Nobel Business
by Carmabaeji - Lively Aria
Summary: CTU investigates all terrorists threats, and when one is called into the LA metro system, Walsh assigns Jack and Nina to help with the investigation, but when it turns out the bomber is one of LA's finest, the investigation turns personal. Pre-24.
1. Make your promises and keep them

Nobel Business  
  
by Aria  
  
Disclaimer: I don't own any of them, and something tells me my student loan won't get them for me.  
  
Rating: PG-13  
  
Feedback policy: Want it, want it all.  
  
Archive Policy: Yes, but tell me where, and keep my name attached.  
  
Author's artistic license: If LA doesn't have a subway or tube system of any kind, I'm inventing one for it. It's run by LA Metro (very imaginative name there). If any of my explosive mumbo doesn't sound right I apologise, it's not my forte, I had to do some research for it. This story actually has a plot!  
  
She couldn't remember when she'd made the cup of coffee, but judging from the taste, it certainly hadn't been recent. The dregs at the bottom of the cup were concentrated and rotten, and it certainly didn't help that they were room temperature. She'd watched the blue bar move from forty- something percent byte by byte and now she wasn't sure what she'd do when it reached a hundred. She looked at the clock in the corner of the computer monitor - 6:04 AM, she'd seen it at 6:04 PM, and 9:56 AM the previous day when she'd logged in.  
  
Nina clapped her hand together as the bar hit 100% and the second screen came up, her report had been encoded and transmitted, and she could go home. She smiled and hit the log off button in the corner of the screen. She pushed her chair off from her desk, and stood up.  
  
Jack walked past her desk, he was early to work, she was late. "Morning Nina." he greeted her, a slightly stubborn, grumpy tone in his voice that had been there a lot recently. "I thought you would have gone home by now, or are you back in?"  
  
"Haven't been home yet," she circled around the desk and picked up the empty coffee cup and closed a manila folder, "finished the breakdown of Develen's accounts - I sent them to division, and there's a copy on your desk."  
  
"I'll read it when I get up there." he commented, pocketing his car keys.  
  
Nina watched the thin layer of black liquid move in her cup as she tilted it, "If you need me to..."  
  
Jack laughed, work was both addictive and the only thing either of them had in their lives. "Go home Nina." he ordered, and began on his way up the stairs.  
  
She nodded, and headed past him towards the board room to deposit her coffee cup, "I'll see you at ten."  
  
Jack turned half way up the stairs, "You came in at ten yesterday."  
  
"Yeah," she commented, not seeing the relevance, or why he had such a quizzical look on his face.  
  
"You're off 'til 2." he told her, taking a step down the stairs.  
  
"Jack, I..."  
  
He cut her off, "I will post you out." he instructed, and took the coffee mug off of her with another step down the stairs. Nina sighed. "Go home." he instructed, and she reluctantly wandered back to her desk to collect her car keys.  
  
Nina noticed the manila folder on her desk and went back behind her workstation to put it in the drawer when her phone rang. She didn't for a second consider leaving it for someone else. "CTU, this is Myers." she answered.  
  
Walsh's voice on the other end of the line. "Nina, it's Richard Walsh, I need you and Jack to work with the FBI on a bomb threat." His voice sounded a little slow, she wondered if he was sleepy.  
  
"Where?" she muttered, without having to put too much thought into her words, and pulled a pen out of her desk caddy, and one of her subordinate's report's from her inbox.  
  
"Briefing's at twenty-two sixty-three San Amelia road." Nina scribbled the details in the printer margin, "They're claiming there's a bomb at an LA metro station, but they won't specify which one. The FBI are helping, as are ATF, but I want Jack to take the lead when you get there."  
  
Nina nodded as she wrote, a habit she was trying to avoid, she pressed the phone into the crook of her ear as the paper she wrote on began to slide. Using her second hand to steady it she finished the initial F "They're waiting for you." Walsh told her.  
  
"Understood." The phone line went dead as Walsh hung up. She placed the receiver back in it's cradle, collected the report in her free hand and made her way towards the board room again, suddenly every step began to feel like her body was protesting.  
  
-24-  
  
Jack Bauer ran his fingers along the corner of the photo frame on his desk, an old photo of his wife, that smiled up at him from the frame with young loving eyes. As opposed to the Teri who frowned down at him that night two months ago and had suggested they should spend some time apart. He was startled when the door to his office opened, and Nina walked in.  
  
Her car keys were pressed against a bundle of typed papers in her right hand, and she had an exhausted look on her face. Her hair looked heavy, and her makeup was all gone, her eyes half-lidded, for the first time he could think of, she actually looked weak. "Walsh called," it was a typical beginning, Walsh, Mason or Chappelle would call, all his senior staffers would come in and they'd be at work nonstop for the next twelve hours. Usually it was his chief of staff who was midshift and functioning whilst everyone else drunk coffee like it was the drink of the gods, but today she'd been caught out of sync. "There's been a bomb threat to the LA metro system - he wants the two of us to work with the FBI and ATF on it."  
  
Jack leant forward a buried his head in his hands for a second. "Where're we meeting?" he grumbled from between his fingers.  
  
"They've set up a base of operations on San Amelia road."  
  
He nodded, an affect that was dampened by his hands. "I can take Tony, you can go get some rest." Jack suggested, raising his head just enough to gauge her reaction. He would have bet and had easy money on her not taking him up on his offer.  
  
"I'd consider it, but Walsh asked for the two of us." she told him. Jack got up and walked over to his computer terminal at the other end of the office. He logged himself off, and then grabbed his jacket out of his open locker. "I'll drive." he told her firmly, "I don't want you falling asleep at the wheel."  
  
-24-  
  
The base of operations on San Amelia road was an old warehouse building. The upstairs floors had rows of dirty square windows and the lower floors had been cut off from outside light probably for decades. There was huge carpark lined with hatchbacks and police cars, all dodgily parked for ease of exit. Jack pulled into the carpark and did exactly the same, parking his SUV across two parking spaces so he could pull straight out without any chance of interruption. Nina closed the report she'd brought with her and sat up a little in her seat. She'd stolen a pen out of his glove-box and scribbled a few notes on it at a stop light back near the office, and now the pen had worked its way into the hair above her ear, one of her nervous habits she only exhibited when tired or drunk.  
  
"Twenty-two sixty-three?" she asked as she compressed the button on her seatbelt and squinted out at the sunrise over San Amelia road.  
  
"Judging from the squad cars." He pulled the keys out of the ignition and pushed his door open. Outside the morning was just beginning to warm up, but his coat was still necessary as he walked around the car and Nina pushed her door shut.  
  
They started over to the building as a distant road crossing began to beep. "Anything you should mention about this before we go in?" he asked as they reached the concrete plateau in front of the door.  
  
"You forgot to lock the car?" she ventured, trying to look up from the early morning sun.  
  
He reached his hand in his pocket and pressed on his car keys. In the distance his car made a loud click and his headlights flashed. "Anything else?"  
  
-24-  
  
Before the glass door had even shut behind them, they could hear the voice of a well known FBI agent. As they walked side by side down the corridor they heard phones ringing and footsteps, and when they rounded the corner, few people were idle enough to notice their presence.  
  
The agent giving orders turned as he spoke and spotted them across the room. He came over quickly, still belting orders out at his 'troops' only quieting when he came to rest in front of Jack. He greeted him by name.  
  
"Hey John," Jack responded, shaking the hand of the older black man. He had a firm grip, and Jack had the sensation he was rescuing his hand when he pulled it away to gesture towards Nina. "This is my chief of staff down at CTU, Nina Myers."  
  
Nina mumbled 'nice to meet you' as she extended her hand and nearly lost it in the vice-grip.  
  
"Nina," Jack began again, "this is John Copell, he's SAIC at the Santa Monica FBI field office."  
  
Nina nodded as she mentally recognised the name, he'd helped out everyone on occasions, he was a good agent. And towering above her by half a foot, she was tempted to believe he was good in the field. He had the build of a football player, but was obviously too old, grey hair literally peppered his head, and his face was gruff - he still had at least a day's worth of stubble on his face, and wrinkles that had been given plenty of time to settle in.  
  
"Shall I bring you up to speed?" he suggested, glancing over the shoulder at the hum of interagency work behind him, which seemed to be going well - not an ego in the room.  
  
"Please do." Jack said and allowed Copell to lead the way to the central cluster of desks.  
  
"Two hours ago, SanMon station's help desk received a telephone call containing only a sequence of telephone touch tones. The clerk at the desk hung up presuming it was a computer or fax dialup." Copell moved to stand in front of a huge analogue recorder. Two barrels of tape, the size of heads, were suspended on it, surrounded by a glass box. A small metallic contraption was in the corner of the box, tape fed through it, and at the base of the box were the speakers and controls. The workers in the room quieted down as he spoke, and many listened to the briefing again. "Just under five minutes later the call came through again. This time it was being recorded for training purposes." He pressed play on the tape machine, it's huge wheels began to rotate, and the voice of a desk clerk came over the tiny speakers.  
  
"Good morning, this Santa Monica station rail and travel - what is your destination please?" The voice was young and female, possibly a high school or college student who worked mornings.  
  
"Listen up this time, bitch." A gruff male voice.  
  
There were no other words, just a sequence of telephone tones, which Copell allowed to play out in full until the caller hung up. "She told security, who called us." Copell glanced over at Nina and Jack before another agent handed him a sheet of paper. "The first sequence of tones at the end of the message correspond to the numbers 52,63876 - which spells out LA Metro, and a few other nonsense words, and then the second sequence, 0226, which the best we can figure is 'Bam' seeing as 'oh' doesn't have any letters."  
  
"What time was the second phone call, exactly?" Nina asked Copell, looking up at Jack, obviously having thought of something.  
  
Copell had that on the paper he'd just been given. He read it off the sheet. "Four - seventeen."  
  
Nina glanced down at her watch, "I make it Six thirty seven now." She glanced around the room, and saw a few other agents look at their watches and nod. She turned back to Copell. "What if he meant 2 hours and 26 minutes, or two hundred and twenty-six minutes, or even two twenty-six tomorrow morning?"  
  
Copell quickly did the math, "That gives us either six minutes, or an hour and a half or a day." he suggested.  
  
"John, you got any stations covered?" Jack piped up, as the agent who'd handed Copell the sheet of paper handed him a red and white FBI file.  
  
"Yeah, two here in Santa Monica, central and Hollywood." Jack nodded as Copell spoke, opening his file up to find a map of the metro network on the first stapled page, someone had put red marker on the four stations they'd stationed guards at.  
  
"Inform security at the other metro stations." Copell ordered a woman in the distance, she was already holding the receiver to her ear.  
  
"If the call was placed to Santa Monica, what makes you sure it's real and not some kid needing an excuse for midterms?" asked Nina, watching as Jack perched himself on the edge of the desk to read his folder.  
  
He didn't even look up from his folder as he spoke. "In England the IRA used to claim and inform of the police, members and the military of their bombs by touch tone sequences." he flicked a page over, "This guy obviously knows a bit about terrorism and tactics, he may even be an ex-IRA officer."  
  
Nina took the pen out of her hair and turned it in her fingers, the group of listeners around them had broken up, Copell had wandered off into the distance somewhere, and so she perched on the desk besides her superior and began to read over his shoulder.  
  
-24-  
  
"They've set up notices in the terminals - you see a discarded bag, report it to station security - sort of thing, and have guys posted over the main entrances and exits, standing in the centre of all open spaces. They're routinely checking all toilets, payphones, but to give you some idea what they're up against, the guy over in Hollywood has been alerted to twelve unaccompanied bags in the last four minutes." Special Agent Johnson tore a piece of paper off of the fax machine as he spoke. He had a heavy new york accent, and a buzz cut that would nearly put a skin-head to shame. Square jawed and square shouldered, Jack was tempted to believe that Agent Johnson had been in the military, a proffesional boxer or both.  
  
"You'd think commuters would know better than to leave their bags unattended." Jack commented to Nina as she was handed a cup of coffee. She nodded as she blew on the black caustic liquid. "What about bins and mail boxes?" he asked.  
  
"None of these stations have mail boxes in the terminal, as for bins, where possible they've been replaced by open topped ones, and all have been emptied in the last two minutes - our agents are trying to keep an eye out for anyone putting anything bigger than a candy wrapper in." Agent Johnson seemed to have everything covered. As Copell's second, Jack wouldn't have expected anything less. Copell had little tolerance for inadequacy, he viewed everything as crucial, the crux of that being that most of the cases he worked on were crucial. If Nina hadn't proved herself to him within thirty seconds of walking through the door, Copell wouldn't have wasted time with her.  
  
She took the fax from Johnson and began reading through it, all the while eagerly draining the coffee in her mug - he could still see steam rising from it, but he didn't see her flinch at it once until she set the coffee mug down on the desk beside her.  
  
"There was a bomb threat called into one of the stations last week?" she inquired, as Johnson began across the room.  
  
He walked back over, "yeah, but that was a hoax - we traced the call back to a dorm payphone, and some students turned up to the station with cameras, they were going to do a piece on the police as an essay."  
  
Nina nodded, effectively giving Johnson permission to leave. No one had said anything yet, but it had pretty much been established that Jack, Copell and Nina were in charge, with Johnson pretty much following their orders. Jack was thankful that there didn't seem to be an ego in sight, nobody had made any comments about CTU, although he suspected that was because there were few who knew of them, rather than that they all had respect for military organisations.  
  
A phone at the opposite end of the room rung, and Jack gave Nina a knowing look - she glanced at her wrist watch, the longer hand was pointing just below the dash for 9, it was 6:43 pm. "It's happened!" called Johnson from the other end of the room, he was hovering over a clerk who was frantically jotting down notes on a scrap of paper. "A sub full of commuters in a tunnel just after the 57th street stop." he called.  
  
They all bolted for the door, Jack grabbed his coat and pulled his car keys out of his jacket pocket. They got out of the building, into his car, and followed the squad cars and black FBI fleet sedans out onto the mainroad.  
  
-24- 


	2. He caught the rush

The hoards of commuters moving both up and down the stairs showed them that the public hadn't taken much notice of the bomb threat. Nina made her way down the stairs much easier than Jack did, and they approached one of the unformed officers who seemed to be making his way towards them.  
  
"Explosion was at 6:43, the train had left the station thirty seconds before. It blew out just as it had entered the tunnel." Jack nodded, and the cop trotted down to platform three with them.  
  
"The passengers that got off at this stop?" Jack enquired. Nina was jumping down onto the rails with several other agents. Pieces of metal and burnt flesh were on the track and she was quickly disappearing into the tunnel.  
  
"Many had already started or left for their next trains or taxi's." the cop admitted, "I haven't detained anyone."  
  
"Any guess how many passengers were on that shuttle?" In the distance, police officers were rolling yellow tape around the platform entrance and pushing back the rubber-neckers.  
  
"It's the beginning of rush hour, sir." the cop stated, "My guess is that train was standing room only like most of the others at this time."  
  
Jack sighed. "Thanks for your help, officer." he said and walked towards the edge of the tracks. He jumped down onto the track and pulled his miniflash light out of his back pocket, and turned it on as he started down the dark tunnel.  
  
The explosion had probably been in the latter part of the train as the back was blown wide open. The seats were charred, and sickeningly burnt flesh was embedded into them. Maybe seven agents were down on the track, the rest had had the intelligence to keep off the tracks and control the crowd. Four or so were bent over bodies, checking for pulses with gloved hands. Jack carefully made his way to Copell and Nina taking care to walk in a straight line to them, stepping over several charred bodies.  
  
"We're going to need to get some powerful lights in here." he ventured. "We can't conduct an investigation by torch light."  
  
Nina nodded, "I'm going to get someone at CTU to call in Fred Carrey, he's our best explosives expert." She slid through the narrow gap between Jack and Copell to walk back to the light at the end of the tunnel, using her flashlight to find her footing.  
  
Jack decided to walk in the opposite direction, further into the train, where the next carriage began. The train had been parted here too, and the next carriage was a less mangled version of the previous one. At this end of the carriage more of the seats were intact, although the windows were blown out.  
  
Jack noticed a little girl in private school uniform under a bench, there was blood seeping from a massive wound on her head, and one of her arms and legs were twisted at a terrible angle. On an impulse, Jack knelt down beside her, and placed two fingers gently on her neck. He couldn't find a pulse, but as he moved his fingers away she moaned.  
  
"Mommy!" the tiny blonde whispered.  
  
He heard footsteps behind him, and looked up as Copell approached, "John, she's alive." he told him. John leaned down and looked at the little girl. She whimpered, and tried to move her head, screaming in pain.  
  
"It's okay, kiddo, we'll get you some help." he said, and ran back down the other end of the carriage.  
  
Jack heard his heavy footsteps and then his urgent pleas for someone to find a paramedic while he carefully repositioned his flashlight so he could see all her injuries. "You're going to be okay, they're calling an ambulance for you." Jack placed a hand on her forehead, and moved the looser parts of her hair, taking care not to disturb any dried blood.  
  
"Mommy..." she whispered again.  
  
Jack continued stroking her hair, he didn't want to say anything about her parents and give her false hope. The urge to reassure her was strong, though. In his mind's eye she looked so similar to Kimberley, he could easily overlook the different eyes, the nose shape; it was the vulnerability that struck him, and he wasn't going to try and brush it off - for the moment, it was the little girl's best hope.  
  
-24-  
  
Jack followed the paramedics out with the little girl, awkwardly hoisting himself up onto the platform. The little girl had lapsed into unconsciousness when they'd been moving her onto the stretcher, her body's way of protecting her from the pain, and Jack was thankful for it. Once they'd maneuvered her onto the backboard, he'd checked the other passengers for pulses, movement, warmth, and found luckily that many were still alive, simply knocked into blissful unconsciousness by the blast.  
  
Jack finally slung his second leg over, onto the platform when Copell approached from behind him. "The paramedics are calling for more ambulances, there's a good chance that the people in the front carriage are alive." Jack nodded, brushing himself off before extending a hand to Copell.  
  
Copell gripped his hand and nearly pulled him back down to the rails as he climbed onto the platform. "It's a good job the train wasn't longer, or that he didn't place it any further up." Jack commented, turning off his flashlight and stowing it in his back pocket for the meantime. He began scanning the platform for Nina.  
  
"It's a good job we're not expecting much forensic evidence from that wreckage." Copell commented.  
  
"Are your guys photographing the scene just...." Jack was cut off as a camera charged and the tunnel flashed.  
  
"Any guys with no first aid training." Copell commented. Copell was willing to save the human life on that train at any cost, even if it meant completely destroying any evidence. Fortunately or unfortunately they weren't expecting to be able to tell much from the flash burns, so having paramedics traipsing back and forth didn't bother them. Copell was also donating part of his force to help them.  
  
Jack watched Nina approached from behind a corner at the far end of the platform. She walked slowly over to them, fiddling with her phone as she approached. Jack idly wondered how she managed to get herself back onto the platform in her skirt.  
  
He was still staring at her when she got to them, and she followed his line of vision to her skirt and brushed it down self-consciously before talking. "Carrey's on his way, we'll have to let him past the rope line though." she informed him, sliding her phone into her pocket. She looked past her two colleagues to the stretcher wheeling it's way past the crowd and early press-photographers it went. "A survivor?"  
  
"Some of the frontal carriages are intact." Jack turned and surveyed the crowd. He was trying to make out how many reporters were in the crowd, not many, but then it was only twenty minutes since the explosion.  
  
"You going to set up a hotline?" he asked Copell.  
  
Copell rubbed his hand across his chin, "Yeah."  
  
"We have no affiliation for our bomber yet." Jack commented, "We're gonna have to sniff him out."  
  
Nina was getting curious. "How?"  
  
Copell was the one that answered, "We could misinform the media, see who calls the hotline and claims responsibility."  
  
Jack shrugged, it was as good a plan as any. He nodded to himself, he didn't want Nina or himself to do it, as he preferred that the faces of his CTU agents remained off the television. Jack preferred that his agents didn't discuss their professions with anyone who wasn't a government employee, a policy that had doomed his own marriage. It certainly wouldn't help him right now to appear on television as, 'CTU agent, Jack Bauer, had the following to say'.  
  
Both Copell and Nina were watching him with curious concern, which he felt perhaps Nina didn't exactly have the right to do, he'd been silent for a little too long. "We should call the phone company - have one of the FBI hotlines rerouted to San Amelia road."  
  
Copell agreed with him, "I'll call for a few extra agents to man the phones, and I'll have Johnson do a press release."  
  
-24-  
  
"This is it" Nina tossed him the remote, and he raised the volume. The wide-screen tv they'd had brought over from CTU sat on a desk a metre or two away, and as he raised the volume, the staffers began to listen up to Agent Johnson giving their carefully worded press release.  
  
"At ten minutes to seven this morning, a..." Jack pressed the top of the remote to his chin. Nina perched herself onto the desk next to him. She pushed her hair away from her face.  
  
"It's a believable lie." she whispered, not sure on how focused he was on hearing the news report.  
  
Nina drained the second half of her cup, and set it on the desk behind her. "If we hadn't been calculating it, I'd probably have said that was the time." Jack whispered back, reaching a hand behind her to support herself on the desk.  
  
"Good call on that." She nodded slowly, she pushed back her hair again. It was a sign that she was tired. "You holding up?" Once again, a slow nod, her eyes transfixed on the screen.  
  
Jack diverted his attention, Johnson was reading off the number for families to contact, next would be the number of the FBI hotline they'd set up. He listened to check the number was correct, and then eyed the row of telephone clerks they'd stolen off of the FBI switchboard for LA, there were no immediate calls.  
  
Maureen Kingsley's face returned to the screen, and he turned the volume back down to an optional listening level. He reached behind Nina and put it down next to her coffee mug, near his hand. They showed footage of some of the survivors being wheeled to hospital, the less sensitive reporters trying to talk to them on their way to the hospital. Jack was reminded of the little girl.  
  
Nina must have been too "Do you know how the little girl you found is doing?"  
  
"I called the hospital ten minutes ago. She's stable, but they think she might loose her right leg." Jack swallowed hard, scratching the side of his face, he was getting tired and the phones still hadn't rung yet. "I hope she had some family that weren't on that train." he muttered quietly.  
  
"Yeah, I..." Nina's cell rang and the entire room jumped. She looked at the terse faces around her and slid it out of her pocket, flicking it open as she did. "Myers."  
  
Jack turned his attention back to the tv screen and the white house briefing on the president's physical. CJ Cregg was talking about a slight bout of the flu he was getting over, and Jack couldn't help but laugh at what was considered national news.  
  
Nina took her hand away from her second ear, "Jack, it's Fred Carrey, he says he's ready to brief us on the bomb, do you want him to come here, or do you want to go to the station?"  
  
He licked his lips. "Let's meet him there." Jack commented, picking his wrist up off the table to check the time. Coming up on half eleven.  
  
"Fred?" Nina confirmed her caller was still on the line, "We're on our way."  
  
Jack motioned John Copell to come over and picked his coat up off of the desk. "Our guy's nearly finished down at the site, he's going to brief us." Jack tossed Nina her coat and they started for the door, Copell told his troops to call the second anything popped up on the hotline, and trace all calls with the correct time. Johnson was in charge until they got back.  
  
-24-  
  
Fred Carrey had obviously brought as many explosives experts in as he could on such short notice. There was a narrow walkway he'd established that lead from the entrance to the tracks, and other than that the platform was covered in ashes and debris from the train. Officers were sifting through every last piece of the dust, and then packing up and passing it along to another officer to recheck their work. It was a painstaking, tiring and back-braking process - but it needed to be done.  
  
They moved aside to allow a stretcher to carry a black sheeted body off the rails. Jack made his way over to the tracks, jumping down quickly, and then extending a hand to help Nina down, partially curious about how she managed it in her skirt.  
  
Nina spotted Fred Carrey quickly, and made her way over to him. Carrey had certainly made himself a forensics' palace amongst the pain and death in the tunnel. He'd set up fluorescent lights on the walls, and several tech's were taking photographs and examining items with tweezers down here too.  
  
He stood up from his spot on the floor when they approached, offering his glove-less hand for a handshake. He introduced himself, and Nina introduced the others. Carrey knelt back on the floor and shone his flashlight onto a piece of the train wall. "You see those holes." the extra light illuminated thousands of little holes in the metallic sheet.  
  
Nina knelt down beside him as Jack responded. "They almost look like they've been melted into the sheet - and there's little debris." He shone his light across the paneling where a charred brown layer covered the metal, also potted with holes, "that must have been an add." He moved the flashlight back to the hole. "That type of blast, the melted potting, the residue, or lack of it....indicative of C4." Carrey stood up.  
  
He moved back towards the centre of the train, pulling the others away from his evidence. "I'd need to do some chemical tests on the sheet, the very fine layer of residue, but I'd presume it's C4 until I tell you anything else."  
  
He shone his light a little further into the carriage pin pointing a spot that would have been slightly in from the aisle. "I think that's were it would have been placed. In order to observe the pattern I've seen, I'm estimating a couple of pounds of C4, and we've uncovered close to eighty percent of the device."  
  
"Can we see it?" Jack asked, although he knew only the basics about explosives, he wanted to get a vague idea of what the device looked like, it would give him an idea of what to expect of their guy.  
  
Carrey pushed his glasses further up his aged nose and seemed to be considering his suggestion for a moment. He led them back onto the platform. They hadn't noticed a table that been set up along the wall from the entrance, out of the view of the public. Carrey snapped on a second latex glove. "Understandably there were quite a few briefcases in this morning's blast, but we found this one that had been blown apart, rather than incinerated." He passed Nina a pair of gloves that she snapped on, favouring someone he knew handling his evidence, he then passed her a chunk of briefcase corner, the rest of which was laid out on the table as though it had been opened.  
  
"It's complex," Carrey's finger hovered over a tangled mass of wires in the centre of the briefcase. "We think he packed the case out with C4 and placed the detonator in the middle. Unnecessarily complex. These are Pentamax wires, millisecond delay - he set it by timer - top of the line, there's a couple of failsafe loops incase the signal is sent too early." Nina looped her pinky finger under a wire, and raised it a little, she pulled her hand away after a second. A thin layer of grease had coated her gloved finger.  
  
"What is that?" Jack asked, holding her wrist up to get a better look.  
  
"My guess is engine oil, may even be WD40. He wanted the entire thing to go up." Carrey explained. An agent came over with another inch worth of wire, Carrey congratulated him and tried to assemble it into his model. "The bag was probably placed in plain sight, in the aisle, in front of a seat, something like that - I doubt it was in a compartment or under a seat, looking at the blast pattern."  
  
None of them had anymore questions. After a few seconds of silence, Carrey excused himself and went back to work.  
  
-24-  
  
Jack was just turning onto the very end of San Amelia road when his phone rung. He glanced at it on the dash of the car and was about to pull over when Nina reached for it, she turned it over so she could read the display. "It's FBI switch board." She informed him, "do you want me to answer it?"  
  
Jack nodded trying to keep his eyes on the road. Nina pushed the cover of his phone down and pressed a button she hoped would answer the call, and it did. "Agent Bauer?" asked the voice on the end of the phone.  
  
"Nina Myers," she informed the caller, "what have you got?"  
  
"Oh, Ms Myers -it's agent Johnson," the voice sounded a little familiar, "We got a call on the switch board a couple of minutes ago - a sequence of beeps, they correspond to the numbers 43446." Nina pulled her own cell phone out of her pocket, went into the message area and turned it onto predictive text. "It was literally a second ago, they're just about to tell me what it spells, uh..." Nina had already keyed in the numbers.  
  
"'hello'." Nina clarified and looked out the windscreen at the road. "We'll be there in ten." she said, and closed his phone.  
  
"What did they want?" he asked, watching out of the corner of his eye as she plugged the charger back in. "Was that CTU, or.."  
  
She cut him off, "Johnson - he says someone called the hotline, a sequence of tones, corresponding to the numbers 43446. It translates to 'hello'." she informed him, slotting his phone back into the holder.  
  
"He's playing with us." Jack growled, he slowed the car to a stop behind another car  
  
-24- 


	3. The FBI chatline

They'd listened to the tape of the last call more than ten times. The sound guys had been in, taken the tape apart, but there was no distinguishable background noise, and they'd given up and gone home. Jack wanted to scream when Copell reached for the play button on the digital recorder.  
  
Nina's head snapped up to look at him.  
  
"What?" he quizzed, reaching for the coffee jug.  
  
She smiled, "You just..." She paused and eyed the coffee mug, Jack stopped pouring into his own cup, and moved the mug to refill hers, just as she tilted her mug to accept it.  
  
"First tell me what." Jack beamed at her, clearly enjoying his moment of fun.  
  
"This is blackmail," Nina joked back, testing ground for some banter, "You're withholding coffee from me now? I'm on my thirty-first hour awake and you're withholding coffee?"  
  
Jack put down his mug and folded his arms with the jug in his hand.  
  
"You made a strange moan sound. You happy?" Nina held out her mug expectantly. Jack smiled at her and poured. One full cup of coffee. She tossed back her hair again and rubbed the corner of her eye with her free hand, as soon as the cup was full, she raised it to her lips.  
  
The hair refused to stay put, and she tossed it away again. Other than the six or seven gallons of coffee she'd drunk, the agents around her wouldn't have had any indication that she was tired. The only reason he knew was because he knew her shifts, and he knew her habits. He snorted.  
  
Her turn to be confused, "What?" Her fringe strayed across her forehead again.  
  
"You only do that when you're tired." he muttered, rubbing the elbows of his folded arms.  
  
"What?" she asked, a quiet conspiratorial tone in her voice, "what?" she raised her eyebrows at him.  
  
"Fiddle." Nina tossed her hair back again, arching her eyebrows and pleading him for more information with her eyes. "With your hair, with your face." Nina pulled her hand out of her hair, trying to be inconspicuous, and used it to support her coffee cup. The free strands flopped forward, and even Jack could see them as irritating, so he brushed them back for her, and held them in place.  
  
Both of them looked curiously up at his hand. He withdrew it quickly, as though her hair had burnt him, and scratched his own head. Before either of them had a chance to say anything awkward the phone at the far end of the room rung.  
  
-24-  
  
The entire room went tense as the senior members of the investigative team crowded around the young man at the phone. Johnson pressed a button and the tape started recording, whilst another agent with a wired up briefcase began the trace signal. Jack placed a hand on the young man's shoulder and he picked up the phone.  
  
"FBI investigative unit LA..."  
  
The young man stopped speaking as five tones, the ones that everyone had heard several times over sounded over the speaker. 'Hello' in telephone tones.  
  
Jack rubbed and hand across his chin, and took the receiver off the younger man. "Jack Bauer, I'm in charge of this investigation." Nina pressed a hand to her head, he may have been tense, but he was taking leaps she'd just as soon avoid.  
  
A voice on the tape laughed, and then spoke. "Did you like my work?" The entire conversation was being played over a speaker on the switchboard computer. Everyone in the team needed to hear and analyse the conversation for themselves.  
  
"You did a good job of destroying innocent people's lives." Jack deadpanned.  
  
"I don't like you." The voice on the other end told him.  
  
"Well that's a good job," he quipped back, "because I don't like you either."  
  
"Get me a woman."  
  
"What?" Jack looked across the assembled group at Nina, whose brow was furrowed.  
  
"I've got a soft spot for a woman at the other end of the phone - get me a woman." The voice had softened a little, it wasn't really a gruff order.  
  
"This isn't a chat-line I can't just..."  
  
The phone line went dead. Jack passed the phone to the young man at the desk. "I needed at least two minutes, that conversation was only forty two seconds long." the agent running the tracer said, and reset his timer.  
  
"He wants to speak to a woman." Nina commented.  
  
"Yeah I heard." Jack didn't want anyone talking to this guy, not Nina, he didn't like his staff talking to murderers on the phone, there were enough twisted terrorist problems they had to deal with, without domestic terrors plaguing their minds too.  
  
"I'm the only senior female agent..."  
  
"No." he told her firmly. The crowd of agents, including Copell, dispersed, sensing an argument in process.  
  
"I'm trained in hostage negotiations, undercover operations, I think I can handle this.." Nina protested, she wasn't sure yet whether or not he even intended to call in a female communications agent from the FBI, but she couldn't see why he would need to when she was right here.  
  
"No." he was even firmer this time, he shouted his response at her. Nina glared back at him, wondering where the easy banter, even casual flirtation they'd had a few hours ago had gone. Jack raked a hand through his hair and refused to look at her.  
  
Both of them were tense, Nina fixed her gaze at a point on the wall opposite and tried to ignore the questing looks of the agents around them who'd heard Jack's entire outburst. They were standing face to face, inches apart, and neither of them refused to move or even look at each other for fear of conceding their points.  
  
The phone rung, and they walked the five foot they'd strayed from the phone during their argument. Jack didn't bother with the switchboard agent, leaning over the kid's seat so he couldn't answer the call. "Try to keep him talking for the two minutes." Copell suggested.  
  
"Don't let him piss you off." Nina supported. Jack glanced at her, expressionless but she could tell he was thankful for her support.  
  
Jack picked up the phone. "Jack Bauer." The familiar tones sounded over the phone again.  
  
"I said I wouldn't talk to you again. I want to talk to a woman." The voice was once again aggravated.  
  
"Okay." Jack passed the phone to Nina.  
  
"You sure?" she whispered to him.  
  
He nodded and took her once again empty and ever-present coffee mug from her hand as she raised the receiver to her ear. "Hello?" she spoke into it. Nina glanced over at the digital clock on the tracing equipment inside the briefcase. The clock was counting down, at the moment it was reading 1:39:42 and counting down quickly. She didn't have to keep him on the line long.  
  
"Hello." The tone of the voice changed again, it was a little softer. "Who are you?"  
  
"Nina Myers." she told the disembodied voice, as Jack pushed another cup of coffee into her free hand. She gave him a thank you glance, and continued her conversation. "Do you have a name?" She said it in a happy tone, trying to put him at ease, she was mentally running down the negotiating tactics checklist.  
  
"You think I'd actually tell you?" They guy on the other end of the phone sounded a little agitated, possibly angry at her. Nina glanced at the clock, she'd only been talking with him for a few seconds, she didn't want him hanging up on her this quick - the technician still needed a minute and a half before he'd be able to get a trace.  
  
She tried to sound friendly, "I just wanted something to call you - at the moment I'm referring to you in my head as disembodied voice."  
  
The voice laughed, and Nina let herself breathe. "Or maybe a nickname - something we could call the case, Buffalo? Snake? Mongoose?" Again the guy on the other end of the line laughed. Everything depended on keeping him on the line.  
  
"Alright, why don't you call me...." she heard him 'hmm'ing, he was thinking about a name for himself, a few seconds of silence ensued, and she hoped he would realise her tactics. "...Dave."  
  
"Dave?" Nina queried.  
  
"Yeah, simple, normal-sounding." The voice explained.  
  
"Okay, then Dave." Filler conversation, the smallest of small talk.  
  
"Listen, Nina..."  
  
"Dave?" Again she earned a chuckle, and she glanced over at the sound tech guy, he was tapping buttons inside his case, pressing his ear piece to his head, she checked his screen, 45 seconds till they'd have a trace. Nina caught Jack's eye, he was smiling softly at her. He was perched on a table in the middle of the room, arms folded, slightly amused.  
  
"I don't like talking to the switchboard number - it feels so impersonal talking to a number I got off of the television."  
  
He paused for a second, Nina realised he was waiting for her to talk. "Yeah." she wasn't sure what he was getting at.  
  
"See what you can do about getting me another number to call, I'll ring back in a little while to get it." He certainly seemed cordial, and as soon as he finished his sentence, he hung up. Nina held the phone, angry at herself for not saying anything quick enough to keep him on the line.  
  
"How much time did she need?" Jack asked, getting up from his perch halfway across the room.  
  
"Twenty-six seconds." The tech told him, resetting the counter.  
  
Jack walked over to Nina and rubbed her forearm, "Better than I did."  
  
"Yeah." she muttered, she took solace in that fact, and began making a mental list of things to say to keep him on the phone, tactics she'd been taught in training. Jack's hand kept rubbing, only reminding her that she wanted to crawl into bed and get some sleep.  
  
-24-  
  
Jack was sitting alone in the middle of the room. He was reading a report, scratching his ear as he did so, but he wasn't talking with another agent, and no one was making their way over to talk to him. Nina tapped the remote control against her shoulder and turned the volume up a little, giving her a little cover for her conversation with Jack.  
  
She closed the six or so metres between them quickly and leant on the desk near his elbow.  
  
"Nina." He greeted, acknowledging her was a sign he was willing to be distracted.  
  
"What was that about back there?" She asked him in a hushed tone.  
  
Jack turned in his chair to face her, letting the first few pages of the report rejoin the others. "What?"  
  
"The phone call? Why wouldn't you let me talk to him?" Nina was sure he knew what she was talking about, and just playing dumb to avoid the conversation.  
  
"I don't want these people, these criminals in your head."  
  
"As opposed to the pleasant people we deal with at work?" She was incredulous.  
  
"That's different." No support for his viewpoint, nothing to back it up.  
  
"Different?"  
  
"Yes." He swung back to the memo and began to flick through pages one by one back to where he was. Nina wondered if he was going to tear a page off it's staple.  
  
"Different how?"  
  
"These are psychopaths, murderers, madmen, a product of their environment. At least what we deal with..." He paused, watching the page, not reading, but watching as though it would jump and attack him. "At least they believe what they're doing, they know it's wrong."  
  
Nina was glad she'd turned the volume up on the television, he was getting angry again. "Jack, we don't know if he's connected to any..."  
  
He cut her off, but she had calmed him a little. "He's not connected to any group, he would have claimed culpability already if that were the case." Nina nodded, they agreed on this fact. They both sighed, resigned to the fact that round one of their argument was over, and that they'd had a lot recently with quite a few to come.  
  
"So are you going to tell me what's up with you?" She asked him. "Is everything alright at home? Teri? Kim? Are they okay?" She prodded.  
  
If it were any other one of his subordinates, he would have told them that nothing was wrong, that he was fine, and that his personal life was none of their business. He would have felt on high enough moral ground to feel like he could say that if it hadn't affected his work, but the truth was he was wound up and he knew it - he'd been taking it out on Nina and that wasn't fair. Nina was the only member of his staff he trusted enough to even name his family to, but he'd never spoken to her about anything that had happened between them. His discussion of problems was usually limited to 'Teri and I had a fight' unless something serious happened. This was something serious and he hadn't mentioned it to anyone, he was embarrassed by it.  
  
"Teri and I split up."  
  
Nina gulped, she certainly hadn't expected anything this major to be the cause of his recent attitude changes. Her eyes darted around the room, her superior was normally a very private person, especially around people he didn't know, she didn't want anyone to over hear. "I'm sorry." She admitted, rubbing her fingers across the wood she was sitting on. "How long ago?"  
  
"Beginning of last month." He turned back to look at her. Nina nodded, if she thought carefully, she'd seen changes in him that long ago.  
  
"You okay?" she asked him earnestly, touching his thumb.  
  
"Yeah, I'll be fine." He mumbled, turning another page in the report without moving her hand.  
  
Nina took her hand away and they sat in silence for a few seconds whilst he read the bottom half of the page he'd been reading before the conversation. Jack waited until he'd finished to the bottom before he spoke again. "Part of the reason I didn't want you talking with him was that this isn't a CTU case, but now we're involved, and now we have to stay involved."  
  
"You would have left the FBI to deal with this?" she asked, she'd never seen Jack quit anything until it's finished.  
  
He laughed into the report. "No." he admitted to her.  
  
"The majority of the reason, was that you were being overprotective, Jack." She was forced to soften her voice so nearby agents wouldn't hear, but she was careful to keep the warning tone in her voice. "Just because you don't have Teri to protect anymore, doesn't mean that you should transfer it onto me, especially not when it impedes an investigation."  
  
Jack sighed, considering how to apologise to her, something he certainly wasn't good at. He was saved from having to do anything by his cell phone ringing, as with all calls in and out of the office, the entire room jumped.  
  
-24-  
  
"Bauer." His customary greeting when answering his cell phone.  
  
"Jack, it's Richard Walsh. How's the investigation coming?"  
  
"We've made contact with the perp," Jack began, "he's..."  
  
"Perp? Is there a terrorist connection?" Walsh asked.  
  
"No," Jack said, "I don't believe so, several groups have claimed responsibilty for this, but we gave a statement to the media which uses a different time, all the groups, uh - Lambs of God, Arizona White Pride, PFT, they've all claimed they detonated at the time we released."  
  
"But you think you've made contact with the right guy?"  
  
"The bomb threat was made with a touch-tone system, like the IRA used to, and this is the only call we've recieved that contains the same..." Nina patted his shoulder, he covered the reciever and looked up at her. "What?" he mouthed.  
  
"It's him." she said, and Jack recognised the hotline ringing.  
  
"Look, Richard, I'd better call you back." Richard had to tell him okay before Jack could hang up the phone, as his superior, which he did quickly and they sprinted across the room.  
  
-24-  
  
Jack watched his second from a few foot away, safely outside the assembled crowd of technicians. She collected the phone off of Johnson and greeted the caller, almost like he presumed she greeted family members or friends, with a cheerful sounding hello. The five tones sounded, and the man spoke. "Did you manage to get another phone for me to call?" he asked her as soon as they'd finished.  
  
"Yeah." began Nina, Johnson handed her a cell phone the FBI had provided them with for the investigation. They'd figured a cell phone would be better as they could take it out in the field.  
  
"What's the number?" The guy on the other end of the phone line sounded impatient.  
  
Nina turned the phone over to where the techs had taped the number to the battery case, and read it out. "Thank you, Nina." He hung up.  
  
Nina pulled the phone away from her ear. "Time?" she barked at the tracing technician.  
  
"Another minute thirty-five." He replied sounding slightly afraid of Nina.  
  
"Is that phone good to go?" Jack asked, allowing Nina a couple of seconds to be stressed.  
  
"Yeah - charged up, logged in with the network, we've got the frequency so we can trace incoming calls, no passwords set on it..." Johnson reeled off the list, pointing as Nina twirled the phone by it's aerial.  
  
"So now we wait again." Jack resigned, taking a step back towards the centre of the room.  
  
"You were right," Nina grumbled as she walked past him, "he's playing us." She went straight for the coffee machine and poured herself another cup. 


	4. Do you know what normal atmospheric pres...

-24-  
  
It was another three hours before he called the cellphone. During that time Nina had walked around the warehouse with the phone clipped to her skirt, drinking coffee by the gallons. Jack was begining to get worried about how agitated she was getting, and how tired she must have been. Carrey's lab reports had come back, and he'd confirmed it was C4. The paramedics and coroner had been through the scene and announced the death toll, several of the critical patients that had been sent into hospital had been redelegated, either by being moved to intensive care, or the morgue.  
  
The little girl Jack had found had died.  
  
"We were wondering when you'd call back." Nina was trying to keep some semblance of levity in the conversation.  
  
"Well here I am." His tone was light. It only persuaded them to consider him as even more of a bastard. "Have you guys torn the train apart yet? Did you find my art?"  
  
"Your art?" Nina raised her eyebrows and made a disguisted face, normally she'd try to counsel her emotions, but she was too tired to really care.  
  
"It's an art, definitely not a static art, but..." he laughed, his tone taking on a haughty note. Nina glanced at the clock to remind herself of her goal.  
  
"I wouldn't call bomb making an art."  
  
"What else could it be? All that expression, all those souls - I make an art out of their lives." Nina took a moment to breathe and take in his words. "Do you know how to make a bomb?" He asked.  
  
"Sure, you take a bottle, fill it two thirds with gasoline, add a tablespoon or two of detergent, stuff a rag in the top, wait a while so the air becomes impregnated with gasoline vapours, and light the top." The voice laughed, "Oh, and throw it - if you use a glass bottle it'll probably explode on impact."  
  
"Mine were a little more complicated than that."  
  
"Yes they were, you didn't have to throw yours."  
  
"How did I exhibit my art?"  
  
"You rented gallery space." Nina quipped, no laugh. "You put it in a briefcase, left it out in the open."  
  
"I wanted people to see it." Nina chewed on her lower lip, she didn't know what to say - she thought of losing it, having a go at him about the little girl, that they found, the people trapped in the carriages further up, the bodies, the body parts on the track, but he'd either get off on it, or hang up on her.  
  
The man on the other end of the line was obviously social, as Nina's silence pushed him to speak, "How do you guys think I made my bomb?"  
  
Nina scratched her cheek, "C4 - couple of pounds, pentaflex wiring linked to a digital clock, from what I'm told, numerous safety loops, you wanted to make double-y sure it didn't go off before its time." Nina paused and clicked her fingers. "You didn't put it in the train until soon before detonation." Nina tried to keep her revelation out of her voice. "You made your bomb complex, unnecessarily so - afraid to go up in your own creation?"  
  
"Look, Nina.." Nina wanted to laugh at the casual way he said this, even he was trying to keep the convversation cordial. "I'd love to finish this conversation, but I've gotta go, my dinner's cooked." The phone line went dead.  
  
Nina pressed the button to end the telephone call and Johnson read out the time she had left until the two minutes worth of necessary tracing time. "Twelve seconds." Nina scowled in disguist and slunk down into the chair behind her. She'd taken to turning in a little circle during the conversation.  
  
"It doesn't matter!" the tech exclaimed, cautious optimisium in his voice, "It's a cellphone, and we've got a frequency and a sector."  
  
"It that good?" Nina asked, evidently familiar with bomb makings but not a call tracing.  
  
Johnson stopped congratulating the tech to explain, "It means we can put some tracking vans out there, and next time he calls, narrow it down even further. Depending on the success ratio, we could have it down to a city block in less than five calls."  
  
Nina smiled and yawned, the first sign she'd given anyone that she was tired. She cut it off, and was thankful when she realised that once again, Jack was the only one who'd noticed. He'd nodded at her, smiling across the room, realising that now, when exhausted and surviving on caffeine, she needed encouragement.  
  
Copell walked over. "That was good, but there're a couple of things I wanted to go through with you..." Jack's ears perked up, and he wandered over to them, and sat down in a free chair in front of Nina. Copell dumped a binded file in her lap. She picked it up and glanced at the cover and then passed it, in exasperation, to Jack. 'FBI Hostage Negotiation Tactics'  
  
"I think she's acquainted with this, John." Jack said, defending his agent.  
  
"I don't think so," Copell changed and directed his words towards Nina, "You've been allowing long silences - we can't risk the chance that he'll hang up, also I don't exactly think that you should be describing how to make a molotov..."  
  
Nina cut him off, "I think he already knows how to make a bomb, explaining a molotov cocktail isn't exactly the nation's guarded secret - any good chemistry teacher will tell you that."  
  
Copell folded his arms and scowled at her whilst she spoke, occasionally glancing over at Jack to give him a 'look'. "Read it." he told her simply, and walked off.  
  
-24-  
  
She may have been sitting in the middle of the room, but Nina had always been good at blending in. It took Jack a couple of sweeps of the room to pinpoint her, sitting on a chair, just to the side of what had ended up as 'his desk'. She was reading something, occassionally picking up a nearby mug and taking a sip. Jack made his way over, ducking between agents and work spaces.  
  
"Hey." he greeted, placing a hand on her shoulder.  
  
"Hey." she returned, slowly finishing her page before tilting her head to look at him. They smiled awkwardly at each other for a few moments, "I'm reading that Hostage Manual Copell gave me." Nina said to break the silence.  
  
"You're that bored, huh?" he asked her, jokily, pulling up a chair into the narrow slip of space between Nina's side and the table.  
  
"Can you think of anything for me to do?" she asked, leaning back in her chair, angling her body slightly to him.  
  
"There's a real threat to all the LA citizens out there, and there's nothing we can do at this point." He said, placing his second hand on her other shoulder. Nina leant into his hands and he pressed his thumb into her shoulder blade, pausing for a moment before deciding to complete the movement that characterised his massages. "What does it say?" He asked her, trying to cover his unease.  
  
Nina picked the papers off the desk and brought them up to read. "At all times it is important to keep the detainer calm, any changes in mood can have a negative repercussions for the hostage or hostages. People are all different and react in different ways..."  
  
Jack began nodding and laughing quietly, quite surprised that the FBI felt its agents needed such basic instruction. "I get it." he mumbled into her ear, and leant forward to snatch the paper off of her.  
  
"Oi!" objected Nina, sitting forward and turning towards him.  
  
He scanned his way down the page until he found where she had been reading from, and sneaked a glance up at her to smile. "...in different ways - some common tactics are: 1 - Sympathising, This ranges from helping him debate his cause to..."  
  
Nina let out a loud petulant sigh and leant back into her chair, and Jack put the paper in front of her and rested his head on her shoulder, comfortably settling down before reading anymore of the manual. He cleared his throat, "...to agreeing with his dillusions, the latter must be handled with the utmost careful manner...."  
  
The phone rang, and they both bolted upright. He took her hand and swiveled her chair, pulling her up when it got into the right position. "Did you learn a lot?" he whispered as he made his way across the floor.  
  
"Oh yeah."  
  
-24-  
  
The five recognisable tones sounded from the mobile. "Hey, Nina." Dave began, sounding cheerful. It made Nina feel sick to her stomach to talk to this guy and listen to his banter. "Guess what?" sounded out from the phone.  
  
"What?" she deadpanned, glancing over at Johnson and Copell who were communicating with the teams in the field. Just after the last call, they'd sent a large number of tracking vans into the sector grid that they'd found the call from originally, they were hoping their caller was staying in the same place.  
  
"The artist has created another work, and - if you're really good, you can see it..." Nina froze, suddenly wanting to double over and throw up, a mix of exhaustion, hunger and shock.  
  
"What do you want me to do?" Nina asked, as she began to feel dizzy.  
  
Jack came over quickly, almost running, and she begged that no one else noticed how faint she was begining to feel. Jack stood in front of her, searching her face as their caller began to talk. "Somebody's art is very personal. So in return, I want to know something personal about you."  
  
Nina looked Jack in the eye and leveled her head as she asked. "What?"  
  
"Anything, everything." He told her. Nina knew she had no time to aim for, that now they had his cell number and frequency - there was no reason to keep him on for two minutes, the whole point was to keep him on for as long as possible. She was silent for a while. "I'll call back later."  
  
The phone line went dead again and Nina ended the call. With a single glance at Jack he knew what to ask. "Did you get anything off that call?"  
  
"We've eliminated a third of the sector grid." The tech agent called out, and next to him Jack heard Nina sigh.  
  
Johnson started ordering agents to reset all their systems, move the vans ready for the next call and in the noise Jack whispered to Nina to ask her if she was okay, if she still wanted to do this. "We don't have much of a choice." She glanced at the phone and pushed her belt clip open to put it back in its slot.  
  
It rung. She answered it quickly to hear the familiar five tones. "Hello." This time Nina spoke first, backing away from Jack a little, and regaining her confidence.  
  
"You thought about it yet?" he queried.  
  
"I'm not good at talking about myself, you're going to have to quiz me." Nina confessed, plugging her other ear to hear her better. There was a moment of silence and so Nina prompted him to speak. "What did you want to know?"  
  
The voice over the phone laughed a terrible sickly laugh that they hadn't heard for a few hours. "Let's start with the basics," he suggested, "where'd you grow up?"  
  
-24-  
  
Through his headphones he was able to hear their conversation, round two of the getting to know Nina. The first conversation had been about childhood, school, bullies, proms, exams. Jack hadn't really listened to the text of their first conversation, but afterwards he'd listened to the tapes during one of the many times the sound technicians had played them, and made a list of the things he'd asked. Trying to figure out if he was giving them any hints - was the bomb at a school, was it at a concert hall? He scribbled down another word on his list 'art'.  
  
"Have you ever been artistic?" 'Dave' asked.  
  
"Not really, kids do drawings, I'm sure I did." she mumbled. "Although, when I was at college I minored in art for a month or two, Chicago gave me the side of a building to do a mural on." Nina laughed, Jack smiled to himself and glanced over at Nina, a few foot away, sitting on a chair passing the phone from hand to hand as she got tired.  
  
"Really?" that comment had picqued his interest. 'Dave' probably didn't realise that they already had his cell frequency, as he'd been hanging up and calling immediately back quite quickly, leaving himself a minute and a half on each phone call, normally, he would have hung up already.  
  
"I wonder if it's still there." Nina considered.  
  
"So you do appreciate art.." Dave led her back to his favourite topic of conversation.  
  
"Yeah, well, some not yours." Nina commented, instantly wondering whether she should have done.  
  
"Do you know what happens when a bomb goes off?" he asked her, his tone going hushed and conspiratorial. He didn't wait for her to answer. "Do you know what happens when one of mine goes off?"  
  
Jack watched the clock go up to 2:19. There was a possibility they'd be able to keep him on the line long enough for the vans to reposition. "When the signal is sent the C4 reacts, it ripped apart the casing and blew apart the train." Across the room Nina grabbed a handful of hindering hair.  
  
"Do you know what the pressure's like when a bomb explodes? More than a hundred pounds an inch. You know what that is in SI?" Nina quickly did some rough math in her head.  
  
"Something like 700Kilopascals." she said down the phone just as 'Dave' began to tell her.  
  
"Very good!" Dave laughed, and quizzed, "Do you have some little man standing next to you with a calculator?"  
  
"No, you already asked me if I was good at math." Nina stood up and began to walk in a circle around her chair.  
  
"Do you know what normal atmospheric pressures like?" he asked her.  
  
"One hundred and one K-P-A." Nina recited, and Jack glanced over at her, she had her back to him.  
  
"The bomb pressure pushes outwards, creates a vacuum and sucks everything back in. Meanwhile all these people are freaking, and their bodies are being ripped apart by a pressure seven or eight times what they're used to, and then there's the heat." His tone began to sound almost like he was threatening Nina. "Would you like to know what that feels like?"  
  
There were four more tones over the phone line, and the technicians almost tripped over themselves to check which numbers they corresponded to.  
  
Jack took his headset off when he heard the phone click. Nina pressed the hang up button, and put the phone back into her belt clip, she sniffed and pawed at her nose. He walked over to her. "Come with me." he told her, and headed for the door.  
  
-24-  
  
Jack led Nina to the entrance hall and then opened another door on the opposite side of the entrance hall. It led into another room, the same size as their base of operations, with the desks around the room in the same formation but there was no equipment in this side of the room. In their room one side of the wall was covered in doors to empty offices and storage rooms, this room was no different. Jack walked her along that side of the room to one of the doors on the end, and opened it for her.  
  
Nina took the cue and went inside. She reached around the side of the door and switched the light on. Inside the room the fluorescent lights flickered for a while, and then snapped on. Two leather couches were placed on the walls of the room, and there was a lamp table in between them. Nina walked into the centre of the room, and turned back to Jack.  
  
"Get some sleep." he ordered her.  
  
"I need to be in there if..." Nina's protest was cut off.  
  
"Get some sleep," he reiterated, "How long have you been awake?" he wondered.  
  
Nina didn't even need to check her watch to tell him. "Forty-two? Forty- three hours." she told him, "but I can't, Jack, if he calls back..." Nina began to protest, but cut her off.  
  
"I'll come and wake you." Jack said simply, pocketing the phone. He began to walk to the door.  
  
"Jack..." He shut the door behind him, and Nina heard his foot steps retreating from the entry door, and then the door at the end of the corridor shutting.  
  
Nina turned and looked at the couch nearest her. It was probably sized for three people, and was heavily padded black leather, probably quite an expensive couch to be sitting in a warehouse that was rarely used. Nina ran her hand along the cushions, brushing off any debris and feeling for any wet spots or stains. There was very little debris, and no wet patches, so she turned off the light and stumbled back to the couch where she pulled off her shoes before curling up.  
  
Nina flopped onto her back, looking up at the tiny square windows at the top of the walls. They let the light in from the main room, but at the moment there were only faint indistinguishable glows made by the street lamps. She shut her eyes for a moment and then opened her eyes to look at the ceiling, this time she could make out car shapes, and cracks in the glass.  
  
Nina's thoughts went to Jack. He was, after all, only a few rooms over - but she had different reasons to the normal for thinking about him today. They worked together closely very often, they trusted each other, but recently it had been different. Now that Nina had some kind of explanation, she had a clearer view of the last few months.  
  
Nina and Jack worked together on cases regularily, and sometimes they disagreed. But during the first week or so of last month - what she now knew to be just after he and his wife split, he'd been more antagonistic. Nina had blamed herself, although she hated to admit it, that was the time of the month when she would have been more moody, by the time she was back to normal, Jack was less grumpy too, so it hadn't been obvious.  
  
There had been subtle changes in their relationship recently. Touching her hair, rubbing her shoulders today had been far out of the norm, but it was not entirely new. For the last month or so, that'd been different too. They worked in close quarters, and Nina knew that she found Jack attractive, and she'd avoided close contact, she'd always felt awkwards when they touched for longer than absolutely necessary, but recently Jack had been initating it. When they were standing close to tell each other information, he'd touch her elbow, or her shoulder when he stood over her. Nina had to admit that she felt awkward still, but she hated to admit that she enjoyed him touching her.  
  
She'd been attracted to him since they first met. Nina had never believed in crushes - certainly didn't have one for Jack, they worked well together, they were friends, in that they understood each other, and she felt attracted to him, yes. But he was married, and she certainly wasn't going to let him know, they'd both feel embarassed and it would ruin their working relationship completely.  
  
Now he was separated, even though she'd only known for a few hours, she couldn't help but feel that everything was different. Jack was being protective of her back there, he'd been worried about her sleep, or lack of it - Nina couldn't help but feel that she'd been at a disadvantage recently. 


	5. Rise and Shine

-24-  
  
Jack took the sandwich of the agent and waved off his offers to return to the deli. Nina hadn't been in the room, and so there was no reason for the agent to question his list of requests after they'd counted the number of people. He and his partner had bought back several bags of sandwiches from an all night deli a couple of miles down the road, and they dealt out food to the hungry agents. At nearly four am they were all hungry, and hadn't eaten in several hours. One of the telephone clerks had bought a bag of cookies with them, but had had to defend them with their FBI training when Nina, Johnson and a few other agents had managed to steal some.  
  
He doubted any other agents knew where Nina was; he hadn't had a reason to go get her so far. She'd been sleeping for nearly two hours, and the guy hadn't called during that time. Jack suspected his second bomb was going to be in the morning, and he'd been calling regularly up until about one am, and probably wanted to tire them out for his bomb in the morning.  
  
Jack collected his sandwich and iced tea, and headed to the hallway. He shut the door to the next room, and made his way to the office he'd left Nina in to sleep. The lights were off, and so he didn't turn them on, instead pushing the door wide open, and hoping it would stay propped open to let the light in.  
  
Nina was curled up on a couch far from the door. Her shoes were lined up in front of the couch, and she was deeply asleep, facing into the couch. Jack didn't particularly want to wake her up, but he also wanted her to eat something before it got cold. He went over to the couch and sat down on it slowly, trying to minimise the disturbance to the padding. He sat just beneath her feet, where she'd folded them up under her bottom, and put the sandwich and tea on the arm next to him. The sandwich was still hot, so he didn't have to wake her up immediately. The phone was in his trouser pocket, and it was silent at the moment. He fished it out to check the screen and then placed it on the arm of the chair with the food.  
  
Jack reached an arm forward to shake Nina awake, but he stopped himself, and instead leaned back against the couch to take a look at her sleeping face. He couldn't really make her features out in the light, or with her hair folding over her face, but at least he knew where he face was, and that she was asleep.  
  
Jack felt like some kind of weight had been lifted now that he'd told someone about him and Teri separating, he had told people before, but that was only in the mechanics of the actual separation, his landlord when he was getting sorted out with his new apartment, his bank when he opened a separate account for his expenses to be organised from. He'd even told a high school friend he'd seen in the mall and later had dinner with, but although they'd been close in the past, they weren't close now, and it didn't really seem real until he'd told it to Nina. It was nice to tell someone who actually cared, who knew him and was sorry for him, for although Jack didn't want pity, he did want a friendly ear, after all he did love Teri and Kim.  
  
It did worry him slightly that Nina had twigged that he'd been more tightly wound than usual recently. He hated to think that he'd taken his frustration out on his staffers, especially when he'd prefer that most of them weren't aware he was married. Around a few colleagues, not those under his command, he'd have preferred to take off his wedding band in their presence.  
  
In some ways it even annoyed him that he'd told Nina, he wasn't sure exactly why, or exactly how to phrase it so that his mind didn't get angry at him, but they'd always had a good working relationship, he trusted her to watch his back and he didn't doubt that she trusted him. They were also quite similar people, and were good friends - they didn't have time to talk about the minutia of their lives, partly because they didn't have time for the actual minutia itself, but he'd caught her doing little things, things that he knew would make them good casual friends, if they weren't already good working friends.  
  
There was a distinction there that few realised existed, except those in his line of work. Nina and he worked together, but they had self- destructive jobs, and very little time for friends and other relationships. He had considered that maybe his relationship with Teri would have been easier if she had worked with him - their problem certainly wouldn't have been not seeing enough of each other, but a huge shock came to him, the first night in his new apartment, when he realised that they could never have worked together. Teri was smart in a different field, and he very much doubted she would make a good agent, and then like a sudden blow in the back of his mind, he realised that he wouldn't trust Teri in the field, and that sucked the air out of him.  
  
The first day he'd met Nina she'd proceeded to do just that. Nearly three years ago, something they worked together on for four months, Operation Proteus, where she'd been assigned to him. Just dumped on his desk in a folder by Mason.  
  
"She's going to be your operational director, Jack, so get used to it." Mason had told him, and Jack had been doubtful, not impressed with the paper credentials. He'd resigned himself to the fact, and when she eventually walked in he had to admit that the first thing he'd thought of was that she had a nice figure, and then as she approached, that she was attractive. Mentally matching her with her file, but then when she opened her mouth she'd knocked him out of the park. She knew her stuff, able to quote similar cases, suggesting tactics. Jack had thought about Kim revising for exams in the car before school and had compared them, but after a few minutes he'd realised she had a functional knowledge that was able to form ideas on the spot, something that he hadn't expected given his literature.  
  
And when that finished, Mason asked him if he wanted to make any changes to his team at CTU.  
  
So here he was with Nina, this brilliant agent that worked for him, smarter than him, most likely. She'd written papers, when she got too old she could be a lecturer or even a defense adviser, but for now she was his second, and he was thankful for that. He needed people like her behind him - and her work today had put an extra star next to her name. He was glad she was finally getting some sleep, even if he was about to wake her up.  
  
Jack leant over her and used his left hand to support her back whilst he shook her upper arm lightly. Her entire body shook with it, the effect dampened to a gentle rocking by her hips, and she moaned, leaning back, intending to roll over, but stopped by his hand. "Nina." he whispered, from his spot over her, and he gently levered her body further onto the couch so she could lie on her back.  
  
"Jack?" she queried, still not completely awake. She swallowed, and began blinking slowly, rubbing at her eyes when she shut them, and pushing herself in and along the couch until she managed to raise her head onto the arm of the chair.  
  
Jack stood up from the couch for a second to allow her to stretch out her feet into a more comfortable and more ladylike position, he then sat back down in front of her legs, passing her the bottle of iced tea as he did so.  
  
She twisted the bottle until it popped and sniffed the tea; it was too dark to read the label. "What time is it?" she asked into the dark liquid before she began to drink.  
  
"Coming up on four," he replied.  
  
Nina watched him over her bottle for a moment, and then her eyes bolted open, and she nearly spilled the drink as she moved it away. "Did he call?" she almost shrieked.  
  
"No," Jack had to smile at how quickly she'd woken up, "no..I just bought you a sandwich..." He placed the warm chicken salad sandwich in her lap.  
  
"Phew." she exhaled, relieved as she lowered herself into the couch. It may not have been the most appropriate sitting position in front of her boss, but she was tired, and hadn't eaten, so lying down seemed the best thing to do. She pulled the sandwich up and rested it on her chest, unwrapping as much as she could with one hand whilst the second one lowered her bottle of tea to the floor.  
  
She reconsidered her position as the sandwich became increasingly more difficult to unwrap, and hoisted herself up, much in protest to her stomach and head that were beginning to feel the effect of lack of food, and being woken up too early. In her sleep she'd been hoping that the case would be solved before she awoke, and had actually dreamt that that had happened. Eventually she decided on sitting in a normal position on the sofa, and managed to pull the last piece of the foil wrapper off the sandwich. "Where's yours?" she asked Jack, reaching once again for the ice tea now she was comfortable.  
  
Jack stumbled over a few words as Nina tore her sandwich and passed half of it to him. Jack didn't bother to object with her, too hungry to, and bit into his piece before she could do either.  
  
They chewed in silence for a few moments, whilst Jack glanced surreptitiously across at Nina, who looked disheveled. Her shirt had thousands of creases, and her hair had obviously been scratched away from her face a few too many times. Her skirt had ridden up as she'd fidgeted to get comfortable, and Jack tried to avoid looking at the extra three inches above the normal six that he could see of her thighs. He dragged his eyes back up to her face, and watched as she stifled a yawn.  
  
He didn't know how to launch himself into the conversation he wanted to have, and he wasn't entirely sure if he wanted to talk to her about his divorce, or even assess his attraction to her at this time in the morning. He had no idea of how she'd react.  
  
He didn't even realize that he'd been yawning.  
  
"Do you want to catch some sleep here?" she asked him, gesturing to the bed as she took another bite. She chewed and swallowed it quickly, "I was going to go back out there as soon as I'd finished this anyway, it would make it..."  
  
Jack rubbed a hand over his face, the last twenty hours worth of stubble scratching at his palm, and he pushed the last bite worth of sandwich into his mouth. He rotated himself on the sofa to face her as she trailed off.  
  
"Nina." he began, attracting her attention without being entirely sure how to continue. She'd already taken the lid off of the bottle of tea when he spoke, and encouraged him to speak before she took a long sip.  
  
She downed several mouthfuls worth of the cold liquid before she placed it back on the floor, before Jack spoke. There was a few more seconds silence as Jack debated what to do with his hands, eventually leaving them on his lap. "Jack?" Nina spoke his name, to encourage him to talk.  
  
He paused, he had no idea what to say to her, he didn't need to thank her for listening, because she already knew. He didn't want to mention to her that he was attracted to her because she'd probably be offended.  
  
"Jack?" Nina ducked into his field of vision, which had dropped to a spot on the couch arm behind her. "What's wrong?" she was beginning to get worried or suspicious of him, he wasn't sure which.  
  
He muttered a few hurried 'yeah's to calm her down before shifting even further off the couch and patting it. "I think I'll catch a half hour or so." Nina got off the couch and turned, bending down to pick up her tea, and slip her feet into her shoes, whilst Jack stood to maneuver his way round her.  
  
He sat back down on the couch and pulled off his shoes, and unbuttoned his cuffs as he slid himself back and into a lying position on the couch. He was halfway there, when he noticed Nina watching him. He raised a single eyebrow at her, and she snapped back into reality.  
  
"When do you want me to wake you?" she asked him, preoccupying herself with folding the foil back around her sandwich.  
  
Jack pressed the light down on his watch, checking the time before requesting, "Half an hour." he told her, believing he'd be out as soon as his head hit the pillow. "Unless...."  
  
"Unless Dave calls." she finished for him, and made her way towards the door.  
  
"Nina?" Jack called her back just as she grabbed the door handle. He collected the phone off of the arm chair and showed it to her. She walked back over and reached out a hand for it, and Jack handed it to her quickly. She took it, and pressed a button to check the key pad was locked.  
  
He said her name again quickly before she turned to go, and she looked down at him. Jack felt a sudden rush of urgency, if he ever wanted to have anything with Nina he suddenly thought that this was the time to let her know. He gripped her forearm, and ran his thumb across the flesh inside her elbow. He held her arm lightly, giving her room to move away, and plenty of time to before he pulled her slowly towards him. She didn't try to pull back, sliding onto his lap, one leg fitting either side of his on the sofa. In the same fluid movement that she fell into him she lowered her head to his and they kissed passionately as Jack pulled her further into the sofa, eventually landing them comfortably stretched out across the length of the sofa.  
  
Nina dropped the contents of her hand onto the sofa besides them, or where safe onto the floor, as she moved her hands across his chest and up to his chin until he suddenly broke the kiss. "Maybe we shouldn't do this right now." he told her.  
  
Nina practically jumped off of him, grabbing her things like wildfire, but with a carefully injected amount of military calm until Jack grabbed her arm and pulled her back to him for another breathtaking kiss. She took a moment to soften to him this time, and eventually she pulled away. "I meant in here." he whispered to her, kissing her ear lobe. "Just in here." he cooed.  
  
Nina smiled in his embrace. "How about you try for an hour's sleep?" she suggested.  
  
Jack mumbled okay, and placed his arm on her back, pushing her gently off the sofa. She took the hint and grabbed her possessions and headed to the door, shutting it gently behind her and turning off the light in the main hall before she went back out onto the floor. 


	6. First in the morning, last before bed ti...

-24-  
  
Nina slotted the phone into her belt clip, and glanced around the room at the agents busy working. Every fluorescent light bulb in the room was turned on, and Nina was positive she looked terrible under the harsh conditions. When the phone was secure she walked over to what had become Jack's desk, and began reading through any and all papers on the desk. She sat in his chair and rifled through the maps, which had gained more and more detail as they narrowed down the grid. She was annoyed that they hadn't made any progress whilst she'd been asleep, but the logical side of her reminded her that that wasn't exactly possible.  
  
She passed the maps off to the side and moved on to the next sheet. It had four numbers at the top, and a note scribbled on it, 'Last call b4 bedtime' across the top left hand corner. She smiled, now recalling the four tones she'd heard before he hung up. They'd been translated to 0945, and written in large figures across the top of the paper, along with the letters and possible combinations, none of them made any sense. At the bottom of the sheet, Jack had written 'Time' followed by several heavily punctuated question marks, the same conclusion she had thought of, although presumably the agents had run a list of words for him just the same.  
  
Nina wondered if the time meant nine hours and forty-five minutes from the call, or nine-forty five am. She had a feeling it was more likely the latter than the former, although she wasn't sure why. She glanced across the room to see Copell talking with the tech guys at the other end of the room. She stood and made her way over, wanting to see where the tracking vans were, taking the sheets of maps with her.  
  
The maps were of a business area of the city, very little traffic, and high buildings. The odd store, a small pharmacy, Starbucks, two on every corner, the odd apartment building. As a rule no one lived there, except Nina knew that truthfully people worked each night until the early hours, sleeping in their offices. The area was low crime too, protected by high priced security systems and security guards. There was one building in the area that was actually a CIA centre, but Nina wasn't authorised to give the FBI agents the address.  
  
Copell hadn't had the luxury of ninety minutes of sleep. He, like Jack had been awake for the last twenty-four hours, and was most exhausted, he had a layer of stubble across his skin, and bags under his eyes. It took him a while to notice Nina's approach. "What have you got?" she asked him, as he wrenched his neck and then tapped the tech agent's screen, much to the guy's annoyance.  
  
"We got six vans in the field, but there's little we can do until he calls again." Copell was on coffee patrol, gesturing with a mug she hadn't noticed as she came over. Nina glanced down at her phone, hoping that it would ring just because she looked at it, but it didn't. She leant onto the back support of a nearby chair, and watched video footage of the inside of each van on each of six little monitors. In the centre was a display of the city grid with flashing dots where the vans were.  
  
Nina tapped the chair. "The numbers," she began, attracting Copell's attention, "I don't think that they're a word, I think it's a time, this morning." Copell nodded, not taking his eyes off the tracking equipment. He let a few seconds pass and took a sip of his coffee before he made any reply. "Jack was thinking along the same lines."  
  
Nina nodded, she'd seen the scribbles on the paper. Nina noticed her own mobile on the counter where she'd answered all the calls to the hotline from, she hadn't even realised that she didn't have it on her. She shrugged her shoulders and ran a hand across her shirt. She had a bag in the boot of her car, a spare change of clothing, and some other things, for when she went to the gym at work. It would go a long way towards making her feel more alert. She walked over to her phone and considered who to call, she couldn't very well go back to CTU, but her car keys were here, and she couldn't think of a single agent who didn't have enough seniority to feel insulted by being asked to come and collect her keys so they could collect something from the boot of her car.  
  
She flipped open the phone and found her address book, scrolling through all the extensions of her subordinates, she eventually flipped the phone shut and resigned to the fact that she'd be in her uncomfortable clothes all day.  
  
They'd narrowed the search down to six city blocks, which was only fifty or so skyscrapers, and Nina placed the paper on the desk in front of the hotline phone. She grabbed her mobile and called the CTU general phone line, not entirely sure who was posted in right now. "CTU, this is Jamey."  
  
Nina cringed at Jamey answering the phone with her first name, it wasn't exactly wrong; it was just something that she'd never do. "Jamey, I need you to get me the exact addresses of all the businesses in a city district." Nina took the satellite photo off the top of the pile and found the map, matching up the streets in her mind. She gave Jamey the names of the streets that bordered the area, and hung up, asking her to get back to her as soon as possible.  
  
-24-  
  
Nina put the now warm bottle of iced tea in the bin, placing it down gently to avoid it smashing. She glanced down at her watch again, as though another thirty seconds worth of sleep mattered when she'd already left him to sleep for just over an hour. Nina walked across the room to what had become both her and Jack's desk, and collected a copy of the satellite photo she'd been working on with Jamey. Over the phone Jamey had told her the names of the companies that owned the buildings together with those that rented the large amounts of space. There were probably nearly a thousand names on Jamey's list over at CTU, and Nina was considering ways of getting a computer print out, or connection to the data, but right now she had to wake Jack.  
  
She did exactly as he'd done, turning the light on in the main room so she could walk down the corridor to the room she'd left him to sleep in, as he'd left her. Nina hadn't really let her mind wander from the case for the last hour, but now as she considered waking Jack she wondered how they should react to this huge pivotal change that had occurred in a few seconds an hour ago. She knew it was girlish, but she felt almost elated that Jack was attracted to her, and that he wanted to have something with her, at the same time she also realised that they still had time to go back and pretend this hadn't happened, and whilst she was terrified of that, she was almost worried at how they would change now that they had this thing that she couldn't define yet.  
  
Nina opened the door to the office where Jack was sleeping, and saw him roll over in the shadows on the couch. All of a sudden a wave of nausea washed over her and she couldn't walk into the room. She was so nervous, and she swung herself round the doorframe to lean against the wall in the corridor. She took several deep breaths and pressed the back of her head against the wall, the wood made a soft thud. She was terrified to wake him, not wanting to hear him say anything about the last few minutes that they'd spent together.  
  
She didn't think twice about grabbing the phone from her belt clip when it rang. "CTU this is Myers." sprung from her mouth before she realised that it wasn't her phone, which she didn't do until the five familiar tones beeped out across the line.  
  
Her panic morphed into a slightly more business application as she considered running back to the other room to check on the tracking vans. Nina hadn't shut the door, and glanced along into the next room. Everyone had snapped to life, and she could hear Copell and Johnson giving orders so she settled down a little.  
  
"So, I thought we'd go for a quick fire round..." began the sickly voice that Nina wondered if she'd heard in her sleep.  
  
"A quick fire round?" she asked, templing her fingers to her forehead.  
  
"You know, lots of questions, short answers." the voice clarified.  
  
Nina sighed and increased the pressure of the support her thumb gave the phone. "Okay, shoot." Nina had had a few hours without speaking to this guy, and she'd forgotten how creepy it made her feel.  
  
"Favourites." He began, almost like a quizmaster at a question round. Nina scowled at her fingers and flicked her thumb under the nails of each finger of her free hand. "Drink?"  
  
"At the moment I'd go with tequila." Nina smiled to herself. "Normally I'd drink a cosmopolitan, or even just tomato juice."  
  
"Food?"  
  
Nina thought this was the most tedious line of questioning she'd ever endured, and that included hours of testing terrorist resolve, she resisted the urge to groan as she answered him. "Steak."  
  
She felt hungry just thinking about one; he evidently did too, and let out a hungry groan. "How do you like it cooked?" he mumbled, and she wasn't sure that she'd heard him.  
  
She answered anyway, "Rare, can't chew it otherwise, and it loses all of its flavour."  
  
"They say that the French turn their noses up at anyone who asks for their steak to be well done." He said down the phone. Nina glanced up from her study of the floor in the dark to see Jack in front of her. She glanced over at the door to the other room, nobody was looking at them, and if they were, they probably wouldn't be able to make out their shapes. She placed a hand on his chest, which he held in place with his own. "It's true, they do." she told the man on the telephone.  
  
Jack watched her, as she talked. Nina found that she couldn't hold his line of vision for more than a few seconds before she began to get overheated, and dropped her line of sight to her hand on his chest. "What about colour?" he asked her.  
  
"Colour?" Nina was surprised, although in the inane questions sweepstakes she presumed the worst was still to come.  
  
"Green."  
  
"Children's book?" She was right.  
  
Nina let out a sigh, "Cat in a hat." she replied, almost ashamed, unable to think of another children's book. Even though she was watching her hand, she felt Jack's fingers caress it before she saw them. When she glanced up at his face she saw he was smiling at her, an almost devious grin.  
  
"Movie."  
  
Nina was loathe to let out the fact that she was a closet sci-fi fan, "Starship Troopers." she said quietly.  
  
'Dave' heard her and prompted her to explain what it was about. "Giant Killer Bugs." Jack's grin widened and became less sinister. 'Dave' evidently found it funny too as he laughed into the phone.  
  
"Book?" he asked her. This one was a little harder, you couldn't put a book on in the corner of the room and glance over it from time to time, Nina couldn't remember the last time she'd had enough free time to read one. She racked her brain, and eventually recalled one she'd seen on a coffee table somewhere, possibly one of her friends apartments, "Alice in the Looking Glass."  
  
'Dave's voice, if possible began to sound even slimier. "You know, maybe one day you and I should get together, I think we have similar tastes," he suggested.  
  
Nina shut her eyes whilst she answered. "You expect to be a free man when this is over?" she asked him, trying to keep her voice level and avoiding the sensation in her gut that told her this wasn't in the manual, and he might hang up on her.  
  
"When this is over, I expect everyone to know of me, and no one to know who I am, like the perfect superhero." He said, his tone decisive and arrogant, even as though it had been his 'mission-statement' or objective in doing all of this.  
  
There was a long pause when Nina had no idea what to say. She looked up at Jack hoping to be prompted in some way by him. It didn't take long for their social bomb maker to speak up, "Piece of music?"  
  
The phrasing told Nina he wanted some classical music. Another thing she rarely had time for, but she was a fan of the 'cellists Rostropovich and Yo- Yo Ma, and although recently her appreciation had been satisfied with CDs, she was able to answer. "Any of the Bach Cello concertos." She said.  
  
Jack raised his eyebrow at this, unable to hear the second side of the conversation, the statement seemed bizarre; when taken out of context.  
  
"What about sport?" He asked her. Nina couldn't answer this one, she wasn't sure if this was watching or playing, of which the former would be Australian football, a fandom that had tied over from her college years, the product of a triple major and then continuing because of her choice of career. She didn't have time to participate in team sports very often. The most she'd managed was a three-legged race at her nephew's sports day, but that was six months ago now. She asked him to clarify it for her.  
  
"I don't really take part in sport." She replied, once she realised his question. "I run, do yoga, exercise to keep in shape..." she answered the question as best she could. Jack's hand ran down her arm, he stroked her forearm for a minute, and then held her shoulder. Jack was getting ever so slightly bored, and a little frustrated, he wasn't taking part in the conversation, all he could do was be a comfort to Nina.  
  
As with previous phone calls, 'Dave' abruptly ended the conversation, simply saying goodbye as the though the last phrase was a perfectly normal ending to a phone call, and hung up. Nina held the phone to her ear for a minute, and then ended the call and let her arm drop.  
  
Jack moved his hand from her shoulder to roll his cuffs up, and they began walking back to the operations centre. They didn't talk until he was satisfied with the organisation of his shirt. "Is that the first call you've gotten from him?" he asked.  
  
"Yeah." Nina waited for him to walk through the doorway before they continued on. "I was on my way to wake you." she commented, and they headed towards the tracking controller, who was sitting in front of his massive monitoring system, and Copell and Johnson whose voices seemed a little more strained at the moment.  
  
"Anything?" Nina asked the two agents as they came to rest in front of them.  
  
Johnson looked across at Copell, who gave him the same, withering, look back, and then stalked across the room. Johnson sighed, looking down at the floor as he spoke. "He's moved." 


	7. Don't get used to it

"He moved?" Jack growled, "What do you mean he moved?"  
  
"He's no longer in any of the six grid regions we narrowed it down to from the previous call." Johnson explained, "the vans were able to widen the search area back to half a sector, but there's a ninety-five percent chance he's not in that either."  
  
Jack rubbed a hand across his chin, scratching his palm against his fingers. He took a moment to survey the room, the agents at work, all of whom seemed occupied, Nina and Johnson were the only ones watching him.  
  
"What do you want us to do Jack?" she asked him, taking a step towards him when he didn't answer immediately.  
  
Nina's proximity made Jack a little more focused. "Johnson, I want those vans repositioned in less than five minutes, and call the LA field office, I want at least another two vans out there, and I want you guys to see about setting up some kind of criss-cross network with them, can you do that?" Johnson turned away to do his job, and Jack and Nina headed into the centre of the room, he spoke quietly to her, "When he next calls we're going to have to aim for two minutes, they're going to have to use the satellite to get a sector grid via satellite, and that'll..." he glanced over at her, realising that she knew all this, "Anyway, I wasn't checking but that last call was probably more than two minutes, so we need you to keep him talking like last time."  
  
Nina breathed a relieved sigh as she perched herself on the edge of the desk, and she closed her eyes in thought. Jack did the same by her side, resting his hand on top of hers in the narrow gap between the two of them, far out of sight. "You okay?"  
  
"Yeah." she replied, quickly without thinking about her answer, "did you get any sleep?" she asked concerned.  
  
Jack muttered his answer, putting in as much thought as Nina had to hers, he had a higher point for starting up their conversation. "If it makes you feel..." he paused here, "nervous, anxious, invaded to talk to him about yourself, remember, it doesn't have to be the real you on the line there, you can always act like someone else. It has to be your voice on the end of the line, it doesn't have to be the real you." He looked up at her face with open concern.  
  
"I know," his expression didn't alter. "I know." She said a little softer, they held each other's gaze for a moment before Jack let it go, nodding and glancing around the room, then eventually settling his vision on the television set which was barely audible from their position.  
  
The 24 hour news broadcast flashed up with the time in military format, and Nina's mind suddenly flipped to the digits at the end of the phone call. "Zero-nine-four-five," she recited, to give him a reference point for her conversation. "I agree with you, it's a time until the next bomb." Earlier in the evening she'd done some mental calculations. "We're either looking at quarter to ten, or eleven thirty. I don't know exactly why, but I'm thinking the first one."  
  
Beside her Jack nodded, "Covering the first one, we'll know if we're proven wrong." He pointed out.  
  
"True." she mumbled, and allowed herself to look over at him for a second. Jack caught her movement in his peripheral vision, and rubbed her hand gently, interlocking his fingers with hers. It was meant as a comforting gesture, but Nina couldn't help but flinch as his wedding ring made contact with her hand. The metal of the ring wasn't cold, but the mental sensation was.  
  
Jack didn't notice, "I had a hunch he was planning something for the morning, the sporadic nature of the calls in the night, he wanted to tire us out."  
  
It took Nina a moment to respond, slightly fazed by his hand. After a few moments Jack became concerned and she snapped up, nodding to illustrate that she agreed. "It's all part of his game." Jack commented, and with one final pat of her hand, sat down in the chair.  
  
-24-  
  
"Jamey," Nina didn't bother with the pleasantries as her subordinate answered the phone. "Have you gotten absolutely all the names of the companies in that grid I gave you?"  
  
"Yeah, I've only just finished." Replied the young tech agent, Nina could hear the slapping of chewing gum in between syllables. "Where are you? Do you want me to have them sent over?"  
  
"No," Nina said casually, "Put them on the CTU public server, I'm using an FBI access."  
  
"Okay." Jamey said, Nina heard a few quiet slaps, either bubbles of gum bursting or keyboard types. "It's done." Jamey replied after a few seconds of silence. "Named t-u-b-i-t-f-oh-one." Jamey recited.  
  
"What?" Nina wanted to clarify it, even though she'd written the name down.  
  
"Like CTU, FBI and ATF zero-one, first file." Jamie grumbled.  
  
Nina chose to ignore her tone. "Thanks Jamie." She told her, and the hung up. In front of her the computer let out a harsh modem tone, indicating it was connected to the internet, and Nina typed in the address to the CTU website, one of the many branches of the DOD's central website. She was prompted for her badge and access number, which she inputted, and the computer took a while to log her in.  
  
"Hey." Jack stood behind her, leaning down and taking her cup of coffee. He paused for a moment to feel the warmth of the liquid with in and then took a sip.  
  
Nina's similar greeting was decidedly less casual. "I was drinking that." She objected.  
  
"I'll get you another cup." Jack dismissed her objection. "What have you got?" His eyes gesturing her towards the screen just as the page changed.  
  
Nina turned her attention back to the computer, and clicked onto a separate page that loaded decidedly more quickly than the last. It contained several files that were available from a general computer without having to call the CTU satellite guys. Nina quickly found the file Jamey had put in for them, and opened it. "I asked Jamey to compile this for me an hour ago, its a list of all the companies with buildings in the grid we thought we'd narrowed it down to. Little use it is now..." She tapped the screen and used the mouse to click on a building. A list of companies with the relevant floors or room numbers appeared, and Jack leant further over her to read the screen, putting down her coffee mug at the same time.  
  
Nina snatched it up quickly, taking a sip of what was now half a mug of coffee. "It might still be useful." Jack muttered, "If we get a second sector, which my hunch is will be a residential area, we can get an employee list and cross check it with who lives where." Nina nodded.  
  
"Well there's too much data here to print off, so if we do eventually get a match on residential area we'll have to pull in a few CTU agents to do the ground work." Nina commented, leaning back and sipping her coffee.  
  
Jack placed his hands on the arm supports of Nina's chair, his head wavering over hers, the overwhelming smell of coffee in his nostrils. "Are we okay?" he asked her quietly.  
  
"I think so." Nina replied, moving her mouse over to a sky scraper. This time the list had a scroll bar by the side, and it was evident that there were more than a hundred large companies inside this building.  
  
"We need to talk, but right now..."  
  
Nina interrupted him, he didn't need to justify himself, she understood why they couldn't talk about it right now. "I know, Jack." She tilted her head back to see the tip of his chin, "But thanks anyway." Jack leaned down and smiled at her, he gave thought to kissing her, but knew he couldn't.  
  
Nina smiled at him quickly before she returned to the computer screen. "Jamey colour coded all the company categories..."  
  
"Isn't there a CIA agency in this grid?"  
  
"Yeah, its probably listed in here, that's why I thought we'd have to call in someone from CTU to do the work up..."  
  
"Right, right." Jack nodded, and intercepted her coffee cup on its way back to the table. "You don't suppose he's planning on blowing up the building?" He commented, "That he knows where it is?"  
  
"I think he likes the publicity." Nina commented, after a thoughtful pause. "During the last conversation..."  
  
"I heard the tape."  
  
"...Right, well, during the last conversation, he said something about being well known, a superhero, if he did choose to destroy 'The Agency's headquarters, the media coverage would be avoided, very little information would be released."  
  
Jack nodded, he was more inclined to go with Nina's impressions of him, she was after all, the one that had spoken to him. "Also, they're security is bound to be tighter than ours."  
  
"Yeah." he muttered. He drained the last of the coffee cup, "Well, I'm going to check in with CTU, and I will bring you another cup of coffee, but don't get used to it." He whispered the last few words conspiratorially.  
  
She nodded and scanned the list of companies, checking for any that were involved in security, defense work, anything similar, and may have hired ex- military, explosives experts or otherwise.  
  
-24-  
  
Five tones, "Hello Dave." Nina said, glancing over at agent Johnson, and then down at the timer. It had started, and she needed to keep him for two minutes.  
  
"I've got another question for you before I'll tell you where my next piece is."  
  
"Okay." Nina urged him on, sitting down on one of the chairs that had been for the hotline operators, and fiddling with the annoying hairs at the nape of her neck.  
  
"What do you look like?" he asked.  
  
"What?" Nina glanced over at Jack, and then at Copell, who both had the same quizzical looks that Nina had on their faces, Jack seemed slightly alarmed.  
  
"Well?" Nina couldn't stay silent for much longer, she was worried he'd hang up, and they needed to get at least two minutes again on this call.  
  
"Um...I've got brown hair..." she didn't know what to say, describing yourself wasn't exactly a required CTU skill.  
  
"Is it short? Long?" Nina raised her eyebrows.  
  
"Short....uh...blue eyes?"  
  
"How tall are you? Your build?"  
  
"Um, five foot seven...medium build..." Across the room Jack snorted. Nina raised an eyebrow at him and he smirked back in response. "Small...small build..." she changed her opinion, deciding that whilst it wasn't important that 'Dave' know the distinction, now wasn't exactly a time when her own dietary concerns were important.  
  
"What about your skin? Your dress size?" Nina glanced over at Jack, confusion on her face, before replying to his question. She took another look at the clock. It had been nearly forty seconds since the call began, and she guessed she could flood some of that time with inane information about her self.  
  
She took a deep breath, "I've got pale skin, I'm a size three, I weigh a- hundred-and-ten or so pounds, my hair's doesn't reach my chin, my eyes are a pale blue." She punctuated every statement with a few moments silence, allowing her to think of another thing to tell him, she could have made it all up, but she couldn't think of enough true statements to describe herself, let alone falsify all of them.  
  
"I'm not entirely sure what my shoe size is, but..." She paused whilst she took her shoe off, the insole was worn, and she couldn't make out the size, across the room she heard Jack snort again, "...no, can't tell from this pair..."  
  
The clock again during her next pause, she needed at least another fifty- five seconds. "What else is there? Oh, clothing!" She looked down at her creased skirt and rumpled shirt, "well I'm partial to black, at the moment its a skirt and suit shirt..."  
  
"Okay, Nina I think you've earned it." Dave interrupted.  
  
"I have?"  
  
"Yeah, on the city ordinance map the bomb's somewhere in pages 24 and 25." He said.  
  
Nina went silent and looked around the room at the agents, Copell was gesturing to several, presumable to get them to drive to a gas station and pick one up. "I'll presume you got my earlier message." Dave commented.  
  
"Earlier message?" Nina inquired, she had presumed he was talking about the telephone beeps, but she wanted to check.  
  
"Now, now, Nina." every time he said her name she felt insulted, "If your guys are on the ball, you should know what I'm talking about." He spoke in a kind of sing-song-y voice.  
  
A few seconds later the four tones played again, and then he hung up. "Time?" Nina asked as he hung up. "Twenty three more." called out the tech, "But we got a sector grid. And the trackers aren't that far away, by the time he calls again..."  
  
Jack stood up, and walked to stand between Nina and the tech agent, "He's not going to call again." 


	8. The German Shepherd gang

-24-  
  
Jack had passed two agents on his way back into the building; they were heading out to the gas station down the road, at Copell's order to buy a few copies of the Ordnance map, the same map Jack held in his hand. He dumped the map down on the table in front of Nina and Copell. "I just sent out Cochran and Newt..."  
  
"I saw them on the way in."  
  
Nina was flicking through the map to find page 24, and 25, a double spread, when she got to it she placed it on the table in front of them, "And you just had this in the car..." she prompted.  
  
He smiled, "I've been teaching Kim how to drive, its part of her survival kit."  
  
Nina smiled back, and then glanced at the two-page spread, her eyes widened. "He may have narrowed our search area more than he intended to." She muttered.  
  
"What do you mean?" Jack queried.  
  
Johnson passed her the satellite picture of their earlier search area and she rejected it, instead grabbing her own copy with the street names on, "These two streets marked the edges of our search grid during the searching for the call."  
  
"So we've only got to search these three blocks?" Jack asked, watching as Nina's fingers ran along the side of the paper.  
  
"Well if he was calling us whilst he was placing the bomb..." They both glanced up at Copell.  
  
"I'll call the field office and the LAPD. Set up some road blocks, get some sniffer dogs..." Copell trailed off as Johnson passed him his cell phone.  
  
"As soon as possible, it's nearly six, and I want to avoid the bulk of rush hour getting past them." Jack ordered. Copell nodded, and dialed the field office.  
  
-24-  
  
Jack, Nina and Copell didn't need to flash their badges at the officers manning the road blocks, it was so obvious to everyone that they were in charge that they strolled past the wooden barriers without even reaching for the little leather wallets, as they considered the logistics of running sniffer dogs and bomb disposal experts through every room in each building.  
  
"We're rationing it by block, six dogs each." Johnson announced coming over from a canine expert, squatted by her dog, preparing to give it a whiff of a small lump of plastic explosive.  
  
"Six?" Jack was worried about the chance that they'd be able to check all the buildings in time, he glanced down at his watch, which was counting down until 9-45 am, now moving from 3 hours and thirteen minutes to three hours and twelve. He glanced over at Nina, who had the same doubtful look on her face and then back at Johnson.  
  
"Officer Marras from the K9 unit is over there." Johnson gestured to the young blonde who was squatted by a German shepherd.  
  
Jack walked over to her. "Officer Marras."  
  
She only glanced up at him briefly before returning her attention to her dog, "Yep." she greeted, and continued cooing the dog. Another officer handed her a plastic zip lock bag and she accepted it thanking him.  
  
"How long do you think it will take to search each block?" Jack asked her.  
  
"More time than you've got." She told him, and opened the bag, removing from it a lump of white solid; she paused before handing it to the dog, feeling the texture between her fingers. "But we'll have to hope we search the right buildings first."  
  
She held the lump of plastic putty in front of the dog's nose until he barked and then put it back into the bag, she then walked away without saying goodbye to Jack, and took him past several boxes in the middle of the street. The dog was allowed to walk over each one in turn, and eventually he barked, and Marras gave him a small treat. "Zero error control test." Nina whispered to Jack, and then turned back to Copell, heading over to their small centre.  
  
-24-  
  
Nina had decided to walk the block alone, deciding that perhaps one agent alone would be more able to notice a suspicious individual than a hoard of yelping dogs, or a police cruiser. That and the fact that she'd been awake for an entire cold night, and the winter sun was warm. The street was deserted, the police officers had been forcing people to id themselves on sight, and most employees had decided to remain in their office buildings. The mayor hadn't given them permission to evacuate these three blocks of the city, especially as something like a hundred million dollars passed through these building's accounts in the course of the day. It was almost eerily quiet as she walked through the entrance gate into the Nielson Plaza. The central plaza was overlooked by sky-scrapers either side, huge towering glass buildings that made you had to angle your head so far back you thought your neck would snap, the entire plaza was in shadow, except the small portion illuminated by the mirror on the top of the shadow, which caught the light from the top of one building and reflected it on a small metal bench.  
  
The entire area was a testament to ancient art, the huge pewter statues, and the gardens. There were vines growing around the fences near the flowerbeds, and pink flowers in every corner. The pavement was cracked in places, but the gray stones still upheld their part in the grand design, which was probably very strongly competed for by architects from across the country.  
  
Nina was tempted to sit down but knew she couldn't. Never the less, she approached the bench, until a cloud moved across the sky and blocked the light reflected in the mirror. She looked up at the offending cloud, letting her eyes run up the building below it. The cloud was small, it passed with in a few seconds, but Nina had to shield her sun-glassed eyes to keep looking at the building.  
  
It was the Nielson Building, she remembered a few names from the maps, and it gave her an disturbing sense. Standing beneath it, forty something storeys high, nearly forty feet from its base she had trouble seeing to the top. The lower floors were concrete, and then as the building got higher the walls became mainly glass, with the odd panel of concrete. Giving a quick turn she realised that it was taller than the other buildings by at least ten storeys. Nina pulled out her cell phone, hoping that there was enough signal to call her superior's phone.  
  
"Bauer." The signal was perfectly clear, one of the buildings must have an antenna stored in it, she thought idly.  
  
"Jack, it's Nina, look...what's the tallest building in the search grid?" she asked him.  
  
She heard Jack ask Johnson to tell him, and then heard him yell at him, impatient because they hadn't gathered that type of information. Nina was impatient too, and forgetting about any regulations she snapped, "Forget that, run down the street and see what you can see?"  
  
Jack told her to hang on and then there were a few moments silence as he ran down the road. Jack had decided to stay at the operations centre, a tent with FBI logo emblazoned on the side that had been set up, and therefore wasn't far from the corners of the grid. It wasn't long before he spoke into the phone again. "Okay, I can see it, it's in the central block, hang on... I'll grab a map."  
  
"Describe it to me." She ordered, exasperated.  
  
"The tops all glass, its a good ten storeys higher than the buildings around it..."  
  
"Sounds like the Nielson." Nina muttered.  
  
"The Nielson?" Jack clarified, and Nina took a quick step away from the mirror's path as the cloud moved.  
  
"Yeah, I'm stood in front of it, in the plaza." She told him, "I've got a weird feeling about it, Jack." She admitted.  
  
"I'm coming to meet you." He muttered, and then hung up.  
  
-24-  
  
It took Jack a ten minutes to find her. He brought several agents, although he approached her alone, walking through the same archway she'd come through and coming to rest behind her. Nina was staring up at the tower. She'd noticed his approach, but chose not to acknowledge him until she thought he was still. "Hi."  
  
Jack looked up at the tower. "This is the building?" he asked.  
  
Nina nodded, and turned to him. "I think we should evacuate it and have all the dogs check the building for explosives." She said earnestly. The sunlight reflected across her vision when she looked at him, and she took off her sunglasses to avoid the glare.  
  
"What is it?" he asked, his second wasn't one to ask for something so serious on a meaningless whim. If she wanted this building evacuated and searched she was certain this was it.  
  
Nina glanced back up at the building. "It's the largest one in the area. I remember there are a few companies that provide secure escorts, bouncers..." She was reached for reasons, avoiding the one that she really didn't want to say.  
  
"Nina." He caught her attention and she turned back to him. "What else?"  
  
"He wants the publicity." She said simply, and looked back up at the building. "I'm not wild about the visual. It may not be a plane crash, but..."  
  
Jack finally understood why she'd been so reluctant to make her suggestion. He looked up at the tower and had a flashback to the terrible atrocities of September the 11th. He could see the news reports and photographs from the papers, magazines, and news reports. He'd seen too many grieving families, signed too many condolences books. He'd been called in to help arrest and question several suspected terrorists. Now that she'd pointed it out, he could see the similarities; tens of thousands of people worked in this building, and the death toll could easily be just as high. He left her in the courtyard, and jogged back over to Copell.  
  
"We're evacuating this building and getting the dogs in." He told Copell.  
  
"The mayor didn't authorise..." Johnson began to protest.  
  
"Get a hold of building security, I want those people out of there now!" Copell snapped, and his second in command nodded, and ran off into the building. Jack turned to look at Nina, still staring at the building and then retreated to Copell. "You see it?" Copell asked.  
  
Jack nodded, angry that their 'Dave' had chosen such a vivid reminder. He grabbed his radio. "Someone get me Officer Marras." He yelled into it, and there was a loud crackle. There was a short pause, and he heard a vaguely familiar voice. "Marras here."  
  
"I need your entire team up here at the Nielson building." He ordered her.  
  
-24-  
  
Nina glanced at her watch. It was 9:32, and she was walking through the seventeenth floor with four of the sniffer dogs. Officer Marras had divided the dogs into three teams and they were going through the building. Checking sections of each building, leaving the fire escapes and lifts free for the continuing evacuation of building.  
  
Officer Marras was obviously more inclined to speak to her dogs than other people. She'd been curt, speaking only in quick sentences and often leaving a conversation whenever she got bored. She preferred the company of her dog, Prickle, often leading her far ahead of the rest of the team. Given the nature of their work Marras couldn't pet Prickle until she'd found something, and unfortunately that meant that she was gradually retreating further into herself, and had become more and more tense since the day began.  
  
Nina walked up the access stairwell against the flow of traffic. There didn't seem to be enough people leaving the building, and whilst she was hurrying them along, many seemed too intent upon their work to move much faster, to finish their phone conversations or computer work. Marras was on the floor above them, and the remaining four dogs on the lower floor were now making their way up the stairwell, where several sinophobic workers had moved to allow space.  
  
Nina lifted her radio to her lips and pressed the button that allowed her to send. "Floor seventeen is clear, we're moving to eighteen now." She said, releasing the button. She heard twenty or so seconds of static before Jack responded.  
  
A man who worked as an architect on the tenth floor had asked about their investigation, and informed them that the building was actually quite structurally sound, they'd designed it. He boasted that should a bomb go off anywhere above the twenty-second floor, the lower floors should remain intact, and only the floor of the explosion and those above it would be at risk of collapse. Fuelled by this they'd decided to remain in the building and search until the very last minute, but Nina was doubting the chance that they'd manage to either get everyone out, or check the minimum necessary number of floors.  
  
Nina sighed as she passed Marras in the corridor. She and her partner were satisfied with their sections of this floor, and were heading up to the next floor. She called over the confused voices of the workers for Marras to come back. "I want you to check all the sections of floor twenty." She ordered them.  
  
"We haven't done nineteen yet." Marras told her, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. Nina didn't appreciate her tone.  
  
"I know that, I want you on twenty. We'll finish off eighteen and do nineteen." Marras headed back off to the stairs before Nina could finish. "Marras!" she yelled. The blonde turned and cocked her hip impatiently. Nina could have sworn Prickle did the same. "Radio me when you're done with twenty." She called, and the two agents headed off.  
  
-24-  
  
An explosion ripped through the building, and they all felt it shake. The sound was something similar to a thousand pianos falling, and Nina ducked from a falling piece of plasterboard ceiling, she heard the dogs yelp, and turned to see that the dogs belonging to the two officers she'd been working with had knelt on the floor. One, which she had been told was quite young, was covering its eyes with its paws, and Nina couldn't help, even in the circumstances but think it was cute. She ripped her radio off of its belt loop. "Which floor?" She yelled into it, backing away from the screams of people running down the stairway. They still hadn't all evacuated.  
  
There was no response. "Johnson, Copell, Jack...which floor?" she screeched, looking warily up at the roof, and wishing she'd interrogated the architect on the support of the twenty fifth floor.  
  
She soon heard Johnson's voice on the radio, he'd obviously gotten some binoculars and reverted to counting, eventually he was able to answer her, "Twenty-nine, it's on twenty-nine!" he told her, and Nina ran out into the masses of people and began running up the steps.  
  
-24-  
  
The people leaving floor twenty-nine were few, many of them injured. The stairwell seemed to be perfectly intact, but as soon as she opened the door she could see flames in the far end of the corridor. She found an officer, knocked out of the way by the rubble, but slowly picking himself up. "The upper floors aren't safe, make sure anyone who can get down gets down safely." Nina ordered him.  
  
The uniformed cop shook his head of any debris and wiped at a cut on his lip. Eventually he nodded at Nina, and ran towards the exit. She grabbed her torch light, which was still in her back coat pocket, and held her sleeve over her face, ducking down at she ran towards the flames.  
  
She almost didn't hear the radio over the creaking building and cracking wood. "Nina? Which floor are you guys on?" it was Jacks voice, very urgent.  
  
"The dogs are on twenty five." She told him, walking slowly towards the flames. She noticed a man on the floor, his leg so badly burnt his suit had adhered to his skin. "We're going to need some paramedics up here, Jack." Nina proceeded further towards the flames, stepping through the broken glass door of a company into their smashed work space. There were more people in here too.  
  
"Where are you?" he asked.  
  
"On twenty-nine." Nina replied, bending down to feel for a pulse in each person in turn. "We're going to need several ambulances up here, Jack." she told him, as she looked down at her bloodied hand, she refused to wipe it off, and step over several fragments of desk to reach what were potentially more people across the room.  
  
"You shouldn't be up there, Nina." Jack warned, "It's not stable."  
  
"There are people up here." she told him, putting the radio down on the desk as she noticed a piece of rubble trapping one man. A large beam that had fallen from the ceiling, pieces of debris were still trickling down, but the man was conscious underneath the beam and groaning.  
  
"Hang on." She whispered to him, and wrapped her hands under the edges of the beam, and lifting it. It was heavier than she had presumed, and it dropped back down. The man wailed. She decided to give it one more try, realising she was risking seriously hurting him. She took a deep breath and looked around her, grabbing the top of a chair. She lifted the beam in a huge burst of strength and lifted it, wedging the chair piece under it for a moment to regain some strength. The chair back gave way and Nina barely caught it, pushing it off to the side and just clear of the mans body. The inhaled deeply to recuperate, checking the mans pulse again as he went silent.  
  
He was alive, breathing with a lot of difficulty. She rested against the desk, tossing back her hair, and sucking in sharp breaths. She didn't notice another lump of ceiling fall on top of her. 


	9. Danger Response Airway Breathing Circula...

-24-  
  
Jack threw the radio in the general direction of the desk, he missed, and heard the radio clatter to the floor. He grabbed a handful of hair at the back of his head, and pulled on it for a while before he let go, eventually deciding to go into the Nielson building and find Nina for himself.  
  
People were still running in the opposite direction, faster than before, panicked. The explosion had blown out the windows a few storeys up, but from the outside at least, the building looked structurally sound. Nina had run up to the twenty-ninth floor, where the explosion was, and Jack wasn't looking forward to running up the stairs especially with the contraflow of traffic, but she hadn't answered her radio in the last five minutes, and he was getting panicked.  
  
He heard his name being called and he focused on the voice, Copell, after a few seconds he heard his voice behind him again, closer. Jack had just reached the door, and he was forced to turn as he felt Copell's hand on his shoulder. "Jack, where are you going?" he asked.  
  
Jack didn't think much before he answered. "Nina's in there!"  
  
Copell pulled a little on Jack's shoulder as he began to lever himself round the door and into the stream of traffic "She could have put her radio down to help somebody, do CPR, help somebody out...Jack you can't go running in there yet!" Jack started for the door again, and Copell yanked on his shoulder swinging him back against the stone pillar by the door so hard that Jack reverbed off of it. "Jack, we don't know its safe yet, and we have to get all these people out before we start running in there."  
  
Jack bit his lip and glared at Copell, for a moment, the older man wondered if he was about to take a swing at him, but Jack eventually broke the gaze and stalked back to the tent. "Check your radio." He called to his back, and received no acknowledgement.  
  
The passage of people broke a little a few seconds later, and Copell made his was back to the tent. Jack was on his mobile phone, holding the radio in his free hand. He had only just started the call, and was introducing himself. A few seconds later Copell heard him request "Tony, get a hold of an explosives expert on payroll, Carrey, Fred Carrey, I think." He ordered the caller, more than a little irritated.  
  
Copell had noticed that Jack was exceptionally agitated, although in general over the last few hours it seemed as though he himself had gotten more tightly wound, Jack had managed to stay in the same mood that he was always in. Whilst Copell had begun to live on coffee, Jack seemed to be awake and thriving, and Copell suspected that was to do with Nina. Whilst he'd only seen him working with a few of his own agents, but they seemed to work well together, Nina followed orders, and suggested her own points, and Jack seemed more willing to accept contributions from her than other agents. Copell wasn't stupid, he realised that Jack was probably attracted to this woman, he certainly found her attractive, and couldn't imagine why Jack wouldn't, especially as he'd seen a photo of his wife once in his wallet, and they had similar features. Most of the features that dimished her from his person choice were present in Jack's wife, and so he presumed that he was attracted to her too.  
  
Right now it was more likely this type of concerns that were playing on his...friend's mind, and he couldn't let him run into that building, especially if the decision was, for the majority, made by his personal involvement. He couldn't imagine talking to his wife about what had happened to her husband.  
  
Jack was off again, he abruptly ended his conversation, and shut the phone, sprinting across the plaza and back up the steps into the Nielson building. Copell caught what he'd spotted, a security guard walking out of the building carrying someone. He was too far, and didn't know her well enough to tell, but as he chased after Jack, he was sure that the person being carried was Nina.  
  
-24-  
  
Jack dropped to his knees as the security guard placed her on the ground. The flow of people had slowed, partially due to the paramedics and firemen running into the building, and the lack of people remaining. Those moving past ebbed their way around them, allowing him to panic about Nina lying unconscious in his own time. "I brought her down the elevator, I know I'm not supposed to, but..."  
  
For the first time Jack acknowledged the security guard. He glanced up, taking a quick mental all points bulletin, he didn't even realise he was doing it, it was just a habit that he'd picked up, having worked in enforcement for so long. Short brown hair, grey eyes, height indeterminate, although from his build he guessed five eight, muscular, no visible tattoos. "It doesn't matter." Jack didn't care how he'd gotten Nina out, he was just glad he'd gotten her out of the building.  
  
He was glad he was good under pressure. Remembering his first aid training he pressed on both her shoulders and called her name. "Nina!" he shouted. Tapping on both shoulders meant that if she been paralysed down one side she would still be able to feel him. No response.  
  
Next step. "Nina, open your eyes." he told her, ordered her. If she was in terrible pain or nearly unconscious, it was likely that she would respond to an order, such as to open her eyes, rather than to open her mouth and start talking. There was still no response.  
  
Danger. Response. He reached his hand for her neck as the security guard interrupted. "Is that her name?" he asked.  
  
"Yes." Jack growled up at him, glancing over only for a minute. He pressed his index and middle finger of his right hand under her chin and pushed upwards, tilting her head back. Her mouth opened slightly and he slid his left index finger into her mouth and felt for any obstructions, he doubted she was chewing anything when she was knocked unconscious, but he check anyway, and then used the finger to hold her mouth open wide enough to see inside, last check to make sure her airway was clear.  
  
It was, he took his hand out of her mouth and it shut slightly, he continued to support her chin as he lowered his ear to her mouth and listened for ten seconds, looking out across her body at Copell's shoes. Even if he hadn't heard the soft sounds of her breath, he could see her chest moving slowly up and down, by using Copell's shoes as a reference, one second he could see Copell's shoe laces, the next, Nina's chest. He moved back from her face and surveyed her body.  
  
Danger, no more to himself than usual. Response, none. Airway, clear. Breathing, yes. Circulation... there was a gash in her hair line that had at one point been gushing, and was now trickling blood down her face, it was clotting across one side of her forehead, her eyebrow and cheek. Her shirt and skirt were damp with a dark liquid, and as he pressed a finger to the divide between the two, a red liquid adhered to it. As best he could tell, the shirt wasn't adhered to it, so he began unbuttoning the lower buttons with his free hand when a paramedic appeared on the other side of the security guard.  
  
"Let her go with the paramedics." Copell suggested, and one held a collar under her neck. Jack slowly slid his fingers away as the collar was moved in place to provide support, and he stood, taking a step back and giving the men space to work. When the stretcher had been moved out of the space between them he walked over to the security guard.  
  
"You got her out of there?" he asked.  
  
The security guard dragged his eyes from the vanishing stretcher to answer. "Yeah, she was lying on the floor, I saw her run in to help a few people up in JayKays, the, uh, marketing firm, and then this massive block of concrete fell on top of her, and so I pulled it off her and got her down here. I figured she was with you guys out here, cos of the jacket and all."  
  
Jack nodded, Nina had taken an FBI flack jacket out of the tech support van, she'd left hers in his car. "Why weren't you out of the building already?"  
  
"I was trying to get all the people to come out with me, they were all working on something or other."  
  
Jack glanced over at the man, "Thank you for getting her out mister..."  
  
The security guard filled in the blank. "Paulie Davison."  
  
"..Mister Davison, she's vital to the investigation." The security guard shook his hand and Jack wandered back over to the tent with Copell.  
  
The older man quickly fell into step besides him, Jack was wishing he could avoid him, having witnessed his display a few minutes ago, but knew it was stupid to do so. "They're going to take her to Memorial, it's the closest." Copell told him, "I can hold this place down, so you can go with her..."  
  
"I've called in Fred Carrey from CTU again, I'll need to be here to liaise with him." Copell nodded, "I'll probably bring in another member of my team from CTU as well later in the day." Jack told him. They reached the table and he dropped his radio back on the desk, he didn't need it anymore.  
  
-24- 


	10. Just don't let her talk if she has a hig...

The pain in her head was terrible; it felt both heavy and light at the same time, throbbing in some areas whilst others felt lanced, filled with needles. She took a deep breath to overcome the nausea and almost cried out as her abdomen contracted. Here the pain was lancing again, the needles piercing her kidneys and the corner of her liver, stomach and pancreas, spilling blood and acid into the cavity between her organs. It took all her effort to force her eyes to open, and she groaned as the eyelid movement broke a line of dried blood, the scab breaking into thousands of glass-like shards, which stabbed the corner of her now opened eye.  
  
She groaned without thinking and raised a hand, a pain free movement, to her side, where she encountered a thick layer of white bandage, soft and flaky, surprisingly dry against the soggy feeling of the skin underneath. She suspected that her earlier concerns about her blood filled abdomen were exaggerated, although she wasn't sure by how much. After she'd blinked the shards of dry blood out of her eye she was able to make out the ceiling square white tiles with thick gray boarders, and a fluorescent light further down the ceiling nearer her feet.  
  
After surveying her surroundings and securing herself in the knowledge she was safely inside her hospital room she shut her eyes, waiting patiently for the pain to soften into a dull throb, which was about the same time as a doctor came in. "We were wondering when you were going to wake up, miss...uh..." Nina waited whilst he found her sheet and saw her name, "...Myers..." His voice hit the very core of her head trauma, and she wanted to hit the man for being so chipper this early in the...late in the....  
  
"What time is it?"  
  
The doctor laughed, assaulting her mind. "It's certainly not the first time I've been asked that, but it is one of the strangest questions I've been asked when..." Nina began to sit up, not opening her eyes, reaching for the bed, which she was sure, had moved out from underneath her. She became nauseous, dizzy and pulled one of her hands up to hold her head.  
  
In the darkness she felt the doctor's hands on her shoulders pushing her back down onto the bed. "Whoa there horsie!" he exclaimed, to close to her, and she felt the pillow on the back of her head, impacting her like a truck.  
  
She opened her eyes as soon as she sensed the doctor had moved away again, "What time is it?" she questioned again, looking around the room for her clothing.  
  
"It's twelve forty." The doctor reported, Nina watched as he glanced at his watch. She wondered where hers was. "It looks like you've been in the wars, Miss Myers."  
  
It occurred to her that she wasn't quite sure why she was in the hospital, she just knew that she was in pain. Her mind flashed to the most recent thing she could remember, answering a telephone call from someone, they gave her a creepy feeling. Jack burst into her peripheral vision. "Hey!" he greeted her, his low baritone less assaulting, comforting even to her head.  
  
He came right up to the bed and placed a hand on her arm, "How are you feeling?"  
  
Nina's eyes fluttered shut as she contemplated adding a little levity to the conversation, "Depends on how many trucks there were." She eventually whispered. She felt Jack's hand on hers, gripping it, and it confused her, this was way beyond their normal familiarity. She was comforted by it just the same, he leant his free hand over her and brushed back some hair that had landed on her face. "Jack what happened?" she asked, trying not to sound too desperate.  
  
Nina opened her eyes slowly, but with enough time to see Jack nod at the doctor, silently asking him to leave the room. He shut the door on his way out, and when Jack was sure they were alone, he let his hand begin to stroke her hair. "A block of concrete fell on you. You were up on the twenty-ninth floor." He continued filling in details as Nina frowned at him, unsure what he was talking about. He began to get worried. "How much can you remember?" he eventually asked.  
  
"Walsh called, we went to some warehouse and were working on a..." Nina's forehead creased as she thought, and she winched in pain as the cut on her forehead complained.  
  
Jack rubbed her head, "Don't think so much."  
  
She nodded, which made her feel motion-sick. "Dave..." she muttered knowing it was relevant.  
  
"The bomber." He prompted, frowning, increasingly worried about how much she'd forgotten. Nina's eyes widened in recognition suddenly and the last two days came flooding back to her as she recalled phone calls, bombs, dead bodies and sniffer dogs, and Jack in a room without a view.  
  
"Right, how is the case coming? Has anyone examined the scene?" she asked in a flurry, raising herself, slower this time out of the bed. Jack, like the doctor before him, lightly pushed her arms until she began to lower to the bed, except her put a hand underneath her head until it reached the pillow.  
  
"Yes, but I don't know if I'll be filling you in on that just yet." He muttered. She scowled at him.  
  
"Why not?"  
  
"Well let's just remember that a few seconds ago you weren't entirely sure what case it was..." he reminded her. He finally stopped stroking her hair and moved to grip her hand with both hands. Nina rolled her eyes and bit the corner of her mouth. "What happened to me then?" she asked him, raising her free hand to touch the souchers on her forehead underneath her line of clean, but badly dried hair.  
  
"Concrete, big slab, a security guard pulled you out, brought you downstairs. You've been here for the last two, three hours." He told her. Nina nodded, holding her forehead with her fingers as though she was afraid it would fall off. She eventually shut her eyes again as the dull throbbing intensified, and Jack called out for a nurse.  
  
"I'm fine." she told him.  
  
"Nina, just take a pain killer." He argued.  
  
"Fine," she relented, deciding that he didn't really have to push, she'd prefer to take one. "Just don't let her talk if she has a high pitched voice." He smiled at this, even though she couldn't see to check.  
  
Jack spoke to the nurse when she arrived, asking her to give her something for her pain. Nina told the nurse that it was fine, and a few seconds later the woman was injecting a painkiller into her IV drip. "That's the security guy." He commented, and nudged his head towards the television fixed to the wall in the corner of the room. Nina glanced over, where a news reporter was interviewing a security guard. He wore a green uniform, complete with radio, nightstick and name badge, and had seemed to be quite nervous at the presence of cameras. He kept glancing from the reporter to the camera, and back again.  
  
"Well obviously when the bomb went off, I was quite shocked...I mean, I know I was told that there could have been a bomb in the building, but I never actually believed..." He was saying before a reporter cut him off.  
  
"Were you scared at any point?" asked a young black woman whose back was to the camera.  
  
"No, no, I mean...when I was up there I, like I said, I was shocked, but I wasn't afraid, my kids are always saying that I'm their superhero, and today, I just feel like I proved it."  
  
The young woman seemed to lose interest in the story here, transferring back to the studio, "I'm sure the FBI agent you saved is thankful that you were there for her today." She turned her back on him, inadvertently giving the other journalists more time. "That was Paul Davison, and I'm Maureen Kingsley."  
  
The pain in Nina's head took second fiddle for a moment, there was an overwhelming sense of unease about this guy. The superhero part, unfortunately her memory was a little rough at the moment, but she could recall the caller saying something about wanting to be a superhero. Jack turned back to her after he'd turned the volume down again. "He's phoned the hotline twice to find out if you're okay." He commented.  
  
Nina ignored him, "He's the guy."  
  
Jack was surprised, but he generally trusted her judgment. He turned to her and gave her a look that asked her to explain, without actually saying it, he didn't want to question her outright. "The superhero comment, and his voice... I know his voice."  
  
He nodded, and leant back, letting go of her hand to pull his cell phone from his pocket. He dialed Copell's mobile number whilst Nina used his shoulder to steady herself as she sat up, "What are you doing?" he asked her.  
  
"Coming with you." she told him as she propped herself up on the headboard, Copell answered the phone, and Jack didn't get to say anything to her. The signal was weak, so he got up off the bed and walked over to the door.  
  
Jack ordered to Copell to find out the security guard's address and see about getting a warrant from the judge whilst he watched Nina get out of the bed. She slid her feet off the bed and stood, gripping the bed rails with almost white hands as she began to sway. Jack considered moving to support her, but she was steady before he could.  
  
Nina watched Jack out the corner of her eye as she reached under the bed for the bag of her clothing that she knew was there. She emptied the bag onto the bed, and was shocked to see her watch and necklace fall out amongst her things. The thought of putting back on her crumpled clothing didn't exactly fill her with happiness, and as if by telepathy, Jack pointed under the bed. She held the cotton cover up, and saw the bag from the boot of her car underneath. She was thankful she'd changed the clothing inside it recently, although she couldn't remember what to. When she unzipped the bag she glanced over at Jack, a thank you, and pulled out a clean pair of underwear and slipped them on under the hospital gown. She had to push several items aside to find a pair of trousers, which she slipped on the same way. Jack pushed the door shut as she undid the back of her hospital gown, and turned his back long enough to let her pull it off and put on her bra. When he turned back she had her bra on, and was pulling a gray jersey on top.  
  
Nina collected her watch and slipped it on, followed by her necklace, she stuffed her clothes from the last three days into the bag and searched for a pair of socks, ankle tights or similar, which were decidedly harder to find. She slipped one sock on as the pain in head flared up again, and she shut her eyes, pressing her hand to her temples before pressing it to her drip in her arm, checking that it was still there. She the pain seemed to build to a crescendo and then subside, slowly. As the pain began to flow away, she heard a click, Jack's phone shutting, and then felt the bed depress.  
  
She pulled on the other sock on and prodded about on the floor with her foot for her other shoe. "You should stay here." He told her.  
  
"I'll be fine." She told him, not realising that the pain was completely gone now, focusing instead on their potential next move. She pull her watch tight around her left wrist and had to concentrate to undo the hook on her necklace. "Anything interesting turn up at the scene?" Nina asked, attempting to secure the thin gold strap around her neck.  
  
"Carrey recovered most of the device. He's found much less wiring in this one than the last one, he says there weren't as many fail safes." Jack replied, he'd quizzed Fred Carrey on the device, but he had had to ask for the layman's version of the facts, as he wasn't familiar with the intricacies of bombs.  
  
"He wasn't as worried about it going up ahead of time." Nina surmised, "Which fits, right?" She was waiting for his agreement, not realising he was waiting for her to form a theory. She looked over at him for confirmation she could continue, she stood, and covered her bad balance and low blood pressure by continuing. "If he was placing the bomb when he was calling he had plenty of time to get out."  
  
"But the security guard..." he paused here, trying to remember the name, unfortunately, whilst he had a net the names of the bad guys, he'd taken this man at his word, and presumed that the name of the guy who saved Nina's life wouldn't have been important beyond its initial use.  
  
Nina however had an eidetic memory, she could recall ninety percent of the information that she'd seen in the recent past, which for Nina seemed to go back the last six years that she'd worked for CTU. "Davison." she provided, jerking the IV drip out with one fast fluid movement. It only left a little scar, she hoped that all the painkiller had dripped into her before she took it off.  
  
"Right, he was in the building when the bomb went off." Nina turned, having collected all of her belongings, she was ready to go.  
  
"Maybe he knew the blast radius, knew where to avoid until the bomb went off." Nina rationalised, catching his eye for a few seconds before she zipped up her bag. She fingered the zipper, and then took a sharp intake of breath as she realised. "He asked me what I look like, and then he picked me up and carried me out of the building." Jack raised himself from the gurney slowly, nodding, some how this guy had garnered enough information about her to know she'd run into the bomb scene. "How did you know I had a bag in my car?" she asked him, lifting it over her shoulder.  
  
"I do." He provided, and walked over to the door. "I don't like this." They walked through the door and out into the corridor, headed for the admissions desk.  
  
"You need me." Nina whispered, as she noticed the doctor making his way over from another patient. She noticed, much to her content that Jack didn't object to that comment. Nina came to a halt at the point where the doctor would have intercepted them had he been walking a little faster.  
  
"You can't leave, you've got a bruised pancreas, an unexplored blunt trauma to your head. We need to keep you here to have you worked up by a surgical consultant for a laparoscopy." The doctor informed them, his voice decidedly less high pitched now he was irritated.  
  
"And I've got a man who's blown up a train and an office building, and may do so again. I need to be there." She walked around him and Jack led her to the admissions desk.  
  
"We need to do a laparoscopy..."  
  
She cut him off, "Which is to assess the extent of my injuries. Doctor, I know LA hospitals are understaffed, but if you were desperately worried about me, you'd have had me in surgery by now." She put her hand down on the desk, with enough pressure to make a nearby nurse and desk attendant look over. "I'm signing out." She told him.  
  
The doctor reached over the counter and brought up a chip wood clipboard, handing it to a sigh. "I hope you realise you're doing it against medical advice." He told her.  
  
Nina smiled, and took his offered pen, "It's certainly not the first time I've signed out AMA, doctor, and it won't be the last." She muttered, and filled in the relevant details on the form. The doctor took the clipboard and his pen back and Nina turned to Jack. "Shall we go."  
  
He nodded, and walked in the general direction of the parking garage. "No strenuous physical activity." The doctor called after her. Nina looked over at him after his first syllable, and after he'd spoken, she felt Jack's finger's on her shoulder, he pulled the bag off her shoulder, and put it over his own, he started back to the car before she turned back to him. Nina shook her head at his back, following him out to his car.  
  
-24-  
  
When Jack's mobile rung, twenty minutes later, they were stuck in grid locked traffic, five miles from the hospital, nearly joining the freeway. Jack had played a hunch and decided to head for the second sector that they'd got a trace for, but unfortunately they hadn't counted on lunch time traffic, people going out for a meal, or getting in some Christmas shopping. Nina let Jack answer his phone, as it was plugged into the car stereo system, and there wasn't much to concentrate on as far as driving was concerned. He reached up and pressed the 'answer call' button, as she reached for the control on the radio, turning it down two clicks. "Bauer." He answered the phone.  
  
"Yeah, this is Johnson, I'm over at San Amelia Road, Copell's gone down to this guy, uh, Davison's apartment, he said to call you with the address." His voice came out loud and clear over the speakers. Nina rummaged for the pen that Jack had let her borrow yesterday, and found a scrap of paper in the glove box, a receipt for petrol, she decided to write the address down on the back of it.  
  
"Shoot." Jack said, having checked that Nina was ready to take it down. Johnson spieled off an address that was inside the residential area that the phone call had been made from. They were both happy they'd hit something.  
  
"Okay," Jack said once he'd read off his address, "We're heading over there now, but we've hit traffic on riverside, so we're going to take a while, where are we meeting?" he asked, leaning his head towards the phone despite the fact that Johnson would hear him perfectly regardless of where he was in the car.  
  
"It's a diner about a half mile down the road, called the Sunset Diner." Johnson told them. "We've taken over the back room for the SWAT team, the SAIC was going to hold off until you got there."  
  
"Good, has he got surveillance in place?" Jack asked, nodding during the phone call as though Johnson could see him, the same habit Nina had been trying to kick for the last few days which only reared it's head when she was weak, tired or had too much to drink. Nina flipped the mirror down and held back her head so she could look at the blunt trauma that the doctor had talked about. Just under her fringe close to her hairline, there was a huge square of bruised skin that had an assortment of cuts across it, each one carefully stitched. She half listened to the conversation at the same time.  
  
"Snipers on the roof, a listening floristry van outside, a man checking the fuse box. No one's seen any movement from his apartment, but his car is outside and there are sounds from the apartment." Nina let her fringe dropped down and assessed her hair, at some point whilst she was unconscious she had been bathed, and her hair had dried awkwardly. The damage she could make out from the front was nothing that wouldn't be healed by a couple of hours, and so she shut the mirror, hoping Jack wouldn't notice her checking her hair in the mirror.  
  
Johnson dispensed a few bits of traffic advice and then they disconnected, and using his advice managed to avoid what they were told was the worst part of the traffic jam, and make it to Davison's residence in another half hour.  
  
-24-  
  
When they got to the Sunset Diner Nina took longer to remove herself from the car than usual. Standing upright was painful after her body had gotten used to sitting down for so long. She had to use the car door to stabilise herself before she could walk on her own, and so it took her longer to shut the door. Jack didn't miss this detail, although he chose not to comment on it, realising that she hated being weaker too.  
  
Inside the diner, Copell was standing over a map on a desk. It was of the immediate area around Davison's apartment, with the diner being one of the furthest points marked. Copell was delegating the entry points of the SWAT team when they came in. "Johnson managed to get you around the traffic then?" he said instead of a greeting.  
  
Jack and Nina nodded, "I think you were right about this guy," Copell filled them in, handing them Davison's FBI file. "Check it out." He said as Jack opened the file and held it so Nina could see.  
  
"Did some time in the military, advanced explosives." Copell summarised, as they read down the list. Paul Gregory Davison had spent twelve years in the military, only promoted once, even by the length of his service he should have been promoted three times, except he hadn't, he'd been held back because of various disciplinary actions, all pertaining to explosives, it seemed he was a little trigger happy.  
  
"He left, but I got it on good authority from a friend of mine that he resigned only to avoid a dishonourable discharge." Jack waited for Nina to finish before he turned the page. "I interviewed one of his colleagues, last night Davison volunteered for the night shift. As well as working this morning." Nina raised an eyebrow, she wondered why anyone would want to work as much as they had over the last few days, other than to plant a bomb.  
  
"Jerry's been working on the tapes of the recordings…" Copell paused for a moment to lead them the three feet to the table where a sound technician they'd met previously had set up all his equipment. He let him take over, "Jerry." He prompted.  
  
Jerry swiveled his chair to look at them for a minute. "We took the two conversations apart." He turned quickly back to his laptop and clicked on a play button at the top of the screen. It was a section of conversation they remembered from earlier in the evening. Davison's voice played out of the speakers. "…always saying that I'm their superhero, and today…"  
  
He clicked on a second play button, lower down on the screen, this time it was an excerpt of the phone call, "…who I am, like the perfect superhero….Piece…." The technician cut Dave off in mid sentence.  
  
"Now, if we compare the words…" He synchronised the play back and had both conversations play at the same time, so they both said superhero at the same time. The computer drew two sets of lines oscillating up and down to correspond to the voice patterns, and then beeped when both men had finished. The 'superhero' sections matched up. "Bingo." Said Jerry, he swiveled in his chair, and was met with less than amazed faces. "Obviously I have to compare other words for it to be court admissible, but this is a pretty good indicator."  
  
"And, get this..." Copell said in a tone, that showed them how proud he was, escorting them back to the table, "he's never mentioned a family before to anyone."  
  
Nina raised an eyebrow at Jack. "He wanted to feed us that superhero line." Jack surmised.  
  
"He's escalating, he was closer to the second explosion..." In Jack's mind he went back to the building and looked over at Davison again, he could make out burns on the guys hand, "...might have even been too close. If he's inside his apartment, I wouldn't take it to mean its safe, I think he might blow himself up."  
  
"But the guy's an explosives expert Jack, he knows what this stuff can do, in intricate detail..." Nina began, but Jack cut her off.  
  
"You've spoken to him, Nina." He began, "He's got a reverence for explosions, he doesn't know their ins and outs because of the explosives training, he probably joined up to learn about them." Jack snapped the file shut. "I think he wants to know what its like to go up in his own creation."  
  
"But he seems to be all about publicity..." Nina wasn't exactly arguing with him, although that was the impression that others must have received, she was providing the opposing point of view, simply to allow him to fully form his own opinion.  
  
"And because he is, he may try and take a few agents with him, say the SWAT team..." Copell and Nina nodded, an act, which Nina instantly regretted. Touching her fingers lightly to her forehead, she closed her eyes briefly.  
  
"Alright, but we need to get in there soon." Copell prompted, passing Jack the entry plan. Jack scanned the A3 page, and Copell gave him a few brief notes, Nina didn't hear them, the pain making her dizzy. Every agent in the room saw, and as she began to worry about falling she reached out and caught the edge of the desk, hooking her fingers around the edge of the handbag hook.  
  
"Okay, go on this, I'll take point and you aren't going in." He pointed at Nina as he said the last few words. She opened her eyes and mouth to object but Jack wasn't going to let her try and take on several pounds of Kevlar and an assault rifle when she was dizzy just supporting her own weight. "You can't handle it right now, Nina, you're not going in."  
  
Eventually Nina nodded. Coppell tossed Jack a bulletproof vest, complete with FBI emblazoned across it and Nina caught it, holding onto it until he had taken off his own coat. They swapped and she rolled his coated up as he fastened the Kevlar coated Velcro straps. Jack pulled his gun out of his holster and checked the clip, which was full, as he expected it to be. He slotted it away. "Okay, guys, we're going in."  
  
-24-  
  
A younger agent kicked the door in on the count of three, and two more ran inside Davison's apartment, checking the corridor. They yelled "Clear." loud enough so that the entire building could hear, and Jack let another two agents run in before he walked through the door. The four agents that had run in first went with Copell to one side of the entryway, and he and another two went in the other direction.  
  
The corridor was dark wood, and the entire corridor smelled like spices. The smells from the Indian takeaway downstairs were overwhelming, and Jack wondered how he managed to live with it all the time. He tried to remember talking to him outside the building, but he couldn't recall any similar smell, but then he might have not been close enough to him to smell it. He nodded to another agent, and he kicked a door open. It was the bedroom, Jack walked in, surveying the room, checking out the window, looking for anything to do with the case, whilst the two agents checked under the bed, in the closet, looking for an immediate threat from a person or a large explosive. There was a door to another room, slightly ajar. Jack pushed it open wider as one of the agents slowly crept into the room. A bathroom. Clear too, although they checked the bathtub, and the towel cupboard. "Jack, you'd better take a look at this!" he heard Copell's voice from the next room.  
  
Jack ran to the source of the voice, calling back to the two agents. "Check for devices." On the other side of the corridor there was a kitchen and living room, and then another room with a door, Copell was behind that door, in the room that had been outfitted to his workshop.  
  
There was a desk in the centre of the room, completely clean, and several metal open shelves around the room. There was little on the shelves, a few plastic bags, and a drum of something in the corner. There was a large analogue recorder similar in design to the ones they had at their base of operations on San Amelia road, and there was a sketchbook of drawings, notes and the yellow pages on a corner desk. There was only one chair in the room, pushed under the corner desk.  
  
Jack approached Copell; he scanned the papers as they came into view. "Look at this stuff, he hasn't got much, but it's all top of the line." Remarked an agent behind him. Jack froze as he recognised a number on the papers.  
  
"That's Nina's cell." He revealed quietly to Copell.  
  
Copell offered him a single latex glove, which he snapped onto his right hand. "That alone justifies the warrant for him, we should put out an APB, call the networks, get his face circulating..."  
  
"No, that's Nina's cell." He couldn't put enough stress on her name. "It's her personal cell phone number, I have it memorised." How could he forget it? She was his second in command and he had to call her more times than he had to call home and his wife's mobile combined.  
  
"Check." Copell said. Both of them knew he wasn't wrong, but they didn't like the idea that this guy had such confidential information on one of the investigative agents. Jack pulled out his phone and found Nina's cell phone number in the memory. He checked it digit by digit twice before he spoke again. "How the hell did he get her personal cell?" 


	11. One panicked, arrested for indecent expo...

"How on earth could he have gotten your cell phone number?" Was the first thing Jack said to Nina when he walked through the door. He ripped the Velcro of the flack jacket open and pulled it over his head.  
  
"What?" asked Nina, surprised.  
  
"Your cell phone number." He spoke slowly. "Your own cell phone number." He tossed the flack jacket onto the table in front of her and Nina put the cap back on the marker she'd been using and placed her mug of coffee on the table, giving Jack her full attention.  
  
"643..." Began Nina.  
  
"Yes." Interrupted Jack, she raised an eyebrow at him. "Let's go through these tapes, what personal information have you given him?" he asked.  
  
"He couldn't have tapped into the CIA sat net, could he?" Nina asked. They both knew that the CIA had a satellite network was capable of isolating a voice pattern and tracing for it on any phone number. Nina had probably used her cell since she'd first spoken to this guy. With the right software and access to the CIA satellite, after only a few seconds he could have found out her mobile phone number.  
  
"I didn't see a computer in there." He told her, rolling up the sleeves on his shirt. Nina folded her arms across her chest. Thinking of any information she might have given him about herself that could have led to her phone number. There had been no questions about her home, where she lived, she hadn't talked about the Svingskys next door who were always fighting, or the children on the floor below, who loved to play in the roof garden at the end of the hall. She tried to remember if he'd asked her any numbers, or to repeat the hotline number that she might have read wrong. "What could you have said?" Jack asked her.  
  
"Nothing but my name." She told him, absolutely certain. "I told him...which high school, which college, when I moved here...I never said where, or gave him any numbers."  
  
"He could have made up some story to get past the office clerks to find out your information..." Jack considered, he called out to the agents in the room, "Someone get in touch with the education offices, see if anyone's called about Nina's school district asking for information about her from high school, or college." One agent nodded, and Jack presumed he went off to do it.  
  
"Where else could he have referenced your name from?" he asked her.  
  
When Nina didn't respond, thinking of an answer, Jack began mentally searching for possibilities himself, when he came across a simple choice. "What about the phone book?" He queried, "Are you in it?"  
  
"It depends on when they published the last one," Nina thought, "I moved...But that would be my phone number at home, not my cell..."  
  
Jack pulled out his mobile and scanned the memory for her home phone number, he didn't remember it because he rarely had to call it. He pressed the hands free button, and held the phone between the two of them, "Hello, I'm not available right now, but you can reach me on my cell, 643..." Jack ended the call.  
  
"Well that answers that." He muttered.  
  
Nina sighed, of course she had her mobile number on her answering machine, she spent most of her time at CTU, and so anyone who wanted to reach her had to call her cell or her line at CTU. She was angry with herself for putting it on her answering machine message, even though it was a perfectly logical thing to do. She took his flack jacket off the desk and placed it on her chair, and then collected her coffee mug again. "Copell's still over there, checking out his apartment, he's going to start dispatching people to talk to his friends and family."  
  
Nina nodded and took a sip of her coffee, she was just pulling the mug away from her lips when Jack asked. "How are you feeling?" The statement surprised her, and it took her a moment to remember that the encumbrance when she moved her trunk or raised an eyebrow had, only an hour ago, been associated with pain.  
  
"The painkiller must have been an opiate, I'd forgotten about it." She realised, and she absently brought a hand to her waist.  
  
"If you get any unusual pains, bleeding, headaches..." Jack raised an eyebrow at Nina when she opened a mouth to object, "...I'm taking you straight back there." He wasn't about to let her ignore her health any more than he needed her to.  
  
Nina nodded at him, which served as a catalyst for thought. "We should call the networks, most of them have the video footage of him on file, we can ask them to run a profile on him." Jack nodded, and began to do something constructive with his phone, which he'd held in his hand since he'd called Nina's home number.  
  
-24-  
  
Lacey Cauldwell took her latte from the countertop and wandered back into the rush hour traffic to check the timetable. Her husband's train was going to be late, they'd been delayed by nearly an hour somewhere along the line, leaves on the tracks, but it was finally due in twenty minutes. Lacey hadn't seen him in nearly a week now, and she was eagerly waiting for him to get home. She cradled the coffee between her hands and sipped it, tucking her arms as close to her body as possible. She was freezing, standing in the station, which whilst it had a roof, was completely open to the elements on one side to allow the trains to pull in and out. Lacey was used to colder weather than this, but today she'd turned up to pick Stewart up from the station in underwear and one of his large trench coats, so every tiny gust of wind felt like a snowball.  
  
There was a man standing in the middle of the train station, leant up against the pillar that was giving her a creepy feeling. He was also in a long trench coat, except he was obviously wearing clothes under his, she could see khaki trousers poking out from underneath his. He had a briefcase, on the floor by his feet, the man kept glancing down at it, Lacey knew the feeling, he was worried about somebody just casually walking by and picking it up. Lacey had had her bag stolen like that twice. She looked up at the man's face again just as he looked over at her, a sharp glance that scared her enough to look away. When she finally plucked up the courage to look back over, he wasn't paying any attention to her.  
  
For one panicked, arrested for indecent exposure moment, Lacey wondered if he knew what she was wearing underneath her coat, but calmed herself down quickly. The only person who would ever know about this was Stewart when he got off the train, and her best friend who'd persuaded her to do it. Happy again, she began tapping her feet to the beat of a personal stereo that was on quite loudly near her. She glanced up at the timetable again, taking note of the extra eighty seconds that had passed since she'd looked at it last, and she switched her attention to the massive flat canvas television that was doing the days headlines.  
  
There'd been a bomb on the subway yesterday morning, and today another explosion, only a few blocks from Stewart's office. Lacey was desperately happy he hadn't been in town, and hence the lack of clothing. They were flashing up the details of the explosion, as much as the reporters could find out, and Lacey had seen it all earlier, and was tempted to look away. The image suddenly changed from the people running, screaming from the building to a picture of a man, and Lacey read the rolling captions underneath. "Police are currently searching for security guard Paul Davison, who may be involved in the bombing. Anyone with any information on his whereabouts should call the FBI hotline, on..." Lacey ignored the number, concentrating instead on where she'd seen the man's face before. She started chewing on the corner of her lip, and took another sip of her coffee, pirouetting to start with the circuit she'd been walking earlier on.  
  
Lacey found herself in front of the timetables again, and near the guy with the similar trench coat. She considered going over to talk to him but thought the better of it. Instead she settled for glancing at him out of the corner of her eye. She did a quick double take. He was the man from the new bulletin, the security guard that the police were looking for, Lacey felt bile rise to her throat, what if the brief case was a bomb, she was so terrified she thought she was going to faint, and then equally terrified people would see her clothing. She tried not scream as she ran to the opposite corner of the room, pulling out her mobile phone and hoping that the headlines would come up again so she could get the hotline number she'd missed earlier.  
  
-24-  
  
The ride to central station, at seventy miles an hour through a convoy of police cars, was bumpy at best. All they could do was hope that rush hour traffic had moved off the street onto the pavement as soon as they'd heard the sirens, and that each time they rounded a corner, they weren't to smash into the back of a ten squad car pile up.  
  
Jack slammed on the breaks of the car and stopped behind the barricade of squad cars, all of them with their guns trained on the glass entrance doors to the train station. He turned the engine off and didn't bother to lock his car as he jumped out, heading for the floristry van with the tracking equipment in it, followed closely by Nina.  
  
They passed the SWAT team, which was filling out from their van, and went inside the open end of the florists van. Copell was inside waiting for them, he turned in his chair when they stepped up into the van. "What have we got?" Jack asked, standing in the centre of the van whilst Nina took a seat behind him.  
  
"Seven calls to the hotline, fifteen minutes ago, each of them were placing Davison in the train station holding a briefcase." Copell told him, the two agents either side of him typing away fiercely, carrying out heated conversations via their headsets.  
  
"The next bomb?" Jack suggested, Copell nodded.  
  
"Your explosives guy was looking at his apartment before we got the call, he said it looked like he'd recently made another bomb." Copell told them. "We know he's got hostages, but no idea of how many, its rush hour."  
  
Their bomber seemed to like rush hour, it meant more people were out and about, and it was harder to get injured people to help. "The SWAT team?" Jack queried.  
  
"They'll be ready to go in in a few seconds, but a few minutes ago the hotline got a call from our bomber's cell, Johnson read me the string of numbers, but one of the possibilities is, 'don't go in, boom'." Jack nodded, and turned round, looking past Nina to see a thin border on the wall behind her, he lowered himself to rest against it.  
  
"So what do we do then?" asked Nina, glancing sideways up at Jack.  
  
He didn't answer her, so Copell did. "Well these guys..." he gestured to the two tech agents on either side of him, "...are patching into the CCTV system in the station, we're hoping to get some idea of what's going on it there..."  
  
Copell was cut off my Jerry slapping the console and laughing. "Hell yeah!" He exclaimed, and then toned it down again when he realised the tone in the room was less than jubilant. "We've patched into the feed." He said after a cough, and tapped a sequence of commands into his keyboard. The row of monitors at the top of the wall sprung into life, each showing a picture of the activities with in the station. Most were useless, the inside of an empty drug store, the kiosks at Starbucks. Only two cameras showed any people on them. There were nearly a hundred people, all seated in a fifteen metre wide circle around a brief case. Everybody shifted to look at these two monitors. "Where's Davison?" asked Jack, scanning the image for him.  
  
As if on cue, Davison walked into the camera image, he was doing laps at walking pace around the circle, brandishing a gun, and saying something to his hostages, unfortunately the image was black and white and without sound, so they had no idea what he said. Davison walked off the camera image.  
  
Copell called over the SWAT team analyst. The head of the swat team, who Jack had run with in Davison's apartment. "What can you match up with the plans, and what do you think is our best entry point?" Copell asked him.  
  
The young man tucked his helmet under his arm as he made his was round Jerry to look at the screen. "That's the entrance from the platform, the ladies, the gents..." he tapped each door or corridor as he recalled what they were. "That's the entrance to the subway, there's some stores off that way.."  
  
"Any suggestions?" Copell queried.  
  
"From the plans and video footage, I believe my team and I can enter via the subway access in the sewers, from there we can use the ventilation system and the back entrances to ticket booth to get men into the central area of the station, if we're quiet, we can disable Mister Davison and have the hostages out in a total of twenty minutes."  
  
"Hang on a second, Jack." began Nina.  
  
Copell and Jack had focused their attention on the SWAT analyst during his proposal, but Nina had been watching the monitors, and was now intently focused on one. She may have noticed something important. "Nina.." Jack prompted, when she hadn't spoken for a few seconds.  
  
"Hang on a second, Jack." she said again. She walked straight past the three men to Jerry, and leant over his shoulder. "Next time Davison walks past, can you give me a close up on his left hand?" Nina asked.  
  
Jerry nodded that he could and Nina smiled at him. Jack, pushed past Copell and the analyst to approach them. "Nina?" he encouraged, getting more than a little frustrated. She was intent on the computer screen, and he placed his hand on the small of her back.  
  
"There!" Nina exclaimed, tapping the screen as Davison walked past. Almost instantly the image froze and changed to a computer picture screen, and Jerry selected various areas that he zoomed in on, until they had a fuzzy picture of Davison's chest.  
  
"Let's just clear this up." Jerry selected a separate menu, and soon the image became clearer. Nina placed her index finger under some device in Davison's left hand.  
  
"That looks like a remote." Jack muttered, looking over at Nina. She turned and caught his glance. "We can't go in, or he'll blow that bomb." They nodded grimly. 


	12. Calling out of the red

-24-  
  
Jack ran an exhausted hand across his face, and watched his second in command retreat back across the van to her chair. She lowered herself into it, and for a moment he was worried when she placed a hand on her abdomen. She moved it as soon as she was seated, and he breathed a sigh of relief that she wasn't in pain. She rested her forehead on her fingers, and rubbed her eyelids with her fingertips.  
  
They both knew that a single, unnoticed sharp shooter could get off a shot to kill him in a few seconds. Unfortunately during a few seconds, he could easily press a button, flick a switch, or do whatever this control required to blow the bomb. Here they weren't talking about an easy entry, a SWAT team would get noticed, and chances were they wouldn't get the first shot as a perfect kill.  
  
Jack had seen these missions go sour, they rarely went anything but, and it was always catastrophic. He glanced around the room, the technicians had resumed working, and Copell was talking to the SWAT analyst. Jack wasn't sure what they could have been doing, he had yet to formulate an idea for plan B, and so he moved back to Nina, perching on the ridge next to her, because she usually seemed to exude ideas.  
  
She glanced up at him, and they listened to the conversations around them for a few seconds before they began their own. "I don't understand why we didn't get any warning about this one." Nina eventually admitted, giving her eyelashes the last rub before she took her hand away from her face. "I'd like to know how he plans to get out of there...I wonder what the range is on that remote...did Carrey mention anything about any detonators or remotes when he called?" she asked, she was referring to a call that Fred Carrey had made to him moments before they'd gotten the first hotline call.  
  
Jack didn't bother to answer her question, he had some fundamental queries about where they came from, "and you think he intends to get out of there before he blows it?" Jack asked her, frowning and angling himself towards her.  
  
Nina nodded, and then looked up at him, "Why? What do you think?"  
  
Jack wasn't exactly sure what part they differed on; it made it harder to specify what he thought. So he started with the basics. "He made this bomb, to bring to the station as his last act..."  
  
"You think it's a suicide bombing?" she asked him, realising their difference in opinions.  
  
"You don't?" Jack queried.  
  
"Well," Nina let out a breath of air, and scowled, "I presumed he was going to plant a bomb and get out, but then he was recognised and had to take hostages..." she trailed off, thinking about the validity of their respective contributions.  
  
"They're both possibilities..." Jack muttered.  
  
Nina's cell phone rang, and she reached to her belt clip to collect it, flipping it open whilst she continued his train of thought, "...the problem is they're mutually exclusive, and it's a pretty crucial conjunction." She pressed a button to answer the call and pressed the device to her ear. "CTU, this is Myers." She answered, maintaining eye contact with Jack to indicate she wanted to continue the conversation when she was done with the call. Her expression changed when she heard beeps on the phone line, "Davison." she mouthed to him.  
  
-24-  
  
Jack whispered, "it's Davison." to Copell across the room as soon as he realised that was what she'd mouthed to him.  
  
"Her personal cell?" The older black man asked, making his way to stand next to Jack. They both watched her as she listened intently to the other side of the phone. Neither of them could hear the conversation, they couldn't trace the call because they didn't know her cell phone signal, and amplifying the volume would have, for a few seconds at least, meant that she couldn't hear what he said. Just as soon as Copell had come over and settled down, Nina hung up the phone. She hadn't said anything at all during the call.  
  
"What did he say?" Jack asked as she hung up and flicked her phone shut.  
  
"He wants me to go in." She said, she paused before continuing, she could see Jack's temper rising up, and so she addressed the rest to Copell. "He says we've got a half hour."  
  
"You alone?" Jack queried.  
  
She looked at him, he was angry; his voice was low and angry. "Just you."  
  
"No guns, no escort." She leveled her vision to his eyes. "Just me." Both of them wanted to look away, she could hear Jack's silent protest, and she wouldn't let him stop her.  
  
"We've got some light-weight Kevlar vests in the SWAT van..." the analyst offered.  
  
"And I can fit you with a wire..." Jerry added.  
  
Copell nodded to both of them, taking over from Jack for a moment. "Hanrahan," He hailed the analyst by name, "take her to the SWAT van, have your guys fit her with a vest. Jerry, find her the smallest mike you've got, I don't want this guy to know she's wearing either."  
  
Jack and Nina's stand off continued until Hanrahan tapped her elbow and lead her out of the van into the newly falling rain.  
  
-24-  
  
It took Jack a few moments to decide whether or not to follow them to the SWAT van or not. He ended up rushing out into the rain, and caught up with her in a few seconds, the rain was falling heavily and made it hard to see where you were going, and the SWAT team and police officials standing every few feet had to be maneuvered past. Nina had only just reached the van when Jack grabbed her and turned her.  
  
She raised her eyebrows at him, letting the rain drip into her eyes. "It's not a good idea."  
  
"Why?" she asked, "because it's not safe? It's not safe for the civilians in there either, but at least I'll be wearing a wire and a vest."  
  
Jack was getting grilled. He knew when to keep quiet. He'd already realised that her not going in was stupid; he wasn't about to back up a viewpoint he himself knew to be false.  
  
"You know what's funny?" She asked, laughing, joylessly. "If I didn't want to go in you'd probably be persuading me to." She turned around to walk the last few feet to the van and hugged her coat closer.  
  
"That's not true." He called after her.  
  
She glanced at him "Last week it would have been." She yelled back, and a hand reached out of the trunk to help her inside.  
  
Jack looked over at the entrance to the station, letting himself get even more soaked before he rounded the back of the van and climbed inside. The back of the van had seats on either side, fixed to the wall, but Nina was in the sectioned off part of the van, for the transport of criminals. He walked further into the van and pushed the door to the holding area further open. Nina was on the right as he walked in, taking her coat off. The analyst, Hanrahan was on the left, squatted down in the corner, digging out a trunk.  
  
Nina didn't acknowledge him when he walked in, but when she reached for the hemline of her shirt Jack pushed the door almost closed behind him. Jerry was coming through at the same time with a briefcase and fiercely objected to having the door shut in his face. "Hey!" he grumbled, recovering quickly. He pushed the door wide open and walked over to Nina. He set the briefcase down on the bench and flipped it open. Stored inside huge layers of foam were two tiny clear plastic plugs, and a darker black item wrapped in smooth plastic. "This is the perfect thing for the job." He announced, delicately picking up one of the clear plastic plugs. "It's the Onimike 2K...put that in your ear..." Nina did as she was told, pushing the piece of clear plastic far enough in so that no one could see it. "...It's got a digital receiver, and sender, all in these tiny ear plugs. Unfortunately they still need this box..."  
  
Nina pulled off her shirt as Jerry pulled out a flat black pack. "...Cos the signal doesn't get far. Where do you want this?" he asked, peeling off the back of some adhesive strips. Nina shrugged her shoulders, and Jerry frowned. "Uh, back?" he suggested and she turned. Jerry slapped the black pack onto her back above her bra strap, below her shoulder blades. He pushed it on a little too hard. "Uh, sorry." He muttered.  
  
Jerry knelt down to the case and pulled out the second clear plastic plug. He held it out gingerly in front of her. "Where do you want this?" he asked.  
  
"It has to be connected to the back pack?" she asked, glancing at the plugs at the end of the cables. That limited the places she could put it on her body.  
  
Jerry nodded, and pressed a finger to the crook in between her breasts where the middle of her bra strap was. "It usually picks up quite well here." He said, almost shyly and Nina took the bug from him, feeding it through her bra strap and letting the black cord dangle in front of her stomach. She didn't have time for him to be coy.  
  
She turned and passed the lead to him. "Plug it in.," she ordered him.  
  
"Okay," said Jerry, still fiddling with the black patch. "Say something."  
  
"Testing, white noise." Nina said leveling her gaze at Jack as she spoke. They needed a reading from her normal voice; she couldn't speak into the mike.  
  
"Okay, it's picking up." muttered Jerry, moving over to his briefcase, "Say something else."  
  
"Jack in the box."  
  
Jerry watched a device in the suitcase, the sound level on the display changed, and he was satisfied. "And it's transmitting." Jerry clapped his hands together, and looked around the room, the poor guy couldn't catch a break, once again; his enthusiasm was met with silence and glares. "Okay, well it looks like my work is done." He muttered, and shut up his briefcase. Jack moved to let him past, but he didn't notice he was doing it.  
  
Hanrahan passed Jack a white vest, thin and with a low 'v' at the front, designed to be discrete and accommodate both women's clothing and wiretaps. "Give me a call if that doesn't fit." he mumbled, and also walked past him out the door, shutting it loudly behind him.  
  
Nina snatched the vest off of Jack.  
  
Jack settled down on the bench and scratched behind his ear. "I thought we were okay." He said resentfully looking up at her. She stopped wrestling with the vest to look at him. Jack could see her thinking for a minute.  
  
"We are." She relented and released the Velcro underarm on the shirt.  
  
Jack lifted his hand from his lap and scratched a cheek; he tugged on her wrist and pulled her closer, running a finger along the underside of her bandage. "How is this feeling?" He looked expectantly up at her face.  
  
"Like its the only thing keeping me warm." She pulled her wrist from his grasp and pulled the white vest sideways over her head. She fastened the Velcro as best she could, and then accepted her shirt from Jack, pulling that on quickly too. The neck rolled in and she had to straighten it, but she pulled the sleeves all the way down and hugged the material to herself.  
  
Jack got off the bench and stood in front of her. "If this is a suicide bombing...he could just be waiting for you to enter to blow the building." He warned.  
  
"It's a possibility." She commented.  
  
"Yeah." Jack pushed the palm of his hand against the door, checking it was shut before he scooped up her arms and pressed his lips to hers, kissing her quickly.  
  
Nina softened at this and let her fingers fold into his shirt, kissing him again quickly before they had to go back out into the rain. "We haven't got much time." Nina muttered, and collected her coat once more, and then walked past him out of the holding cell and the van. 


	13. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate...

-24-  
  
"You ready?" Copell asked Nina, jumping out of the van to greet them. The rain hadn't let up, and they were slowly getting soaked. She nodded.  
  
"Your piece?" Copell held out his hand, expecting her to pass him her 9mm Glock that was standard issue for CTU agents and the FBI. Nina looked puzzled for a moment.  
  
"It's at CTU," she told him, "I rarely carry it." She explained, and then pulled her mobile off her belt clip. She passed it to Jack rather than Copell. "I think that's it." She ran her hand along her belt and couldn't think of another thing she might be wearing that would offend their bomber.  
  
Jack knew his agents a little better. "Knife?" he asked her, having seen her conveniently with a knife in an ankle holster before he was actually hoping she'd take it with her.  
  
"It's in the car." Nina told him, recalling that she hadn't put it back on when she dressed back at the hospital. She presumed Jack wanted her to remove it, but...  
  
"She shouldn't take it with her anyway." Copell mentioned to Jack. After a few moments of silence, Copell reached back inside the van and pulled out an umbrella. "Looks like you'd better go in." Nina nodded, accepting the umbrella and opening out of the path of other agents.  
  
"You're sure the wire's working?" Jack asked the technician who'd retaken his seat at the console.  
  
Jerry nodded, having learnt his lesson earlier, he kept a sombre mood. "I did a quick level check when you guys were in the van."  
  
Jack nodded, he wondered if anyone had heard his short discussion with Nina, but didn't notice any smirking or quiet comments, they were either too professional or they hadn't overheard their conversation. He touched his hand to Nina's right elbow, as Copell did to her left, and they steered her until she was facing the entrance to the station. Nina ducked under the orange tape and made a run for the station.  
  
-24-  
  
Nina collapsed the umbrella as she reached the station door, folding the cord around it, and leaving it propped up against the outside of the door. She took a deep breath before she opened the door, hugging her coat tighter before the heating fans hit her.  
  
She'd only travelled by rail a few times before, most of them as a student, or when she'd lived in Chicago and then New York using the subway every day. The inside of the station was huge, three storeys high, the rafters were filled with birds, and the only sound she could hear was their cooing. This first part of the station was designed to grab last minute shoppers, luggage stores, and flower shops, news agencies. It was completely empty, and Nina walked down to the turnstiles at the end of the room. She didn't have a ticket, and so she climbed up onto the turnstile and crawled over the top. The electric door whooshed open, and she leant back onto the machines to let it shut again and spoke, opening up her coat and leaning towards her chest. "Can you guys hear this?" she quietly asked, hoping she couldn't be heard through the doors.  
  
The earpiece crackled, and Jack's voice came over it, "Don't worry we've got a nice clear signal." He reassured her, and she slipped off the turnstile and walked through the electric door.  
  
"That didn't take too long." Said a voice that she instantly recognised. She turned to its origin and was presented with the image from the camera footage. Davison was walking towards her, carrying the briefcase, but behind him was the circle of people he'd seated on the floor. Businessmen, metro workers, school children, teenagers, mothers, seated in a massive circle on the floor. He held his gun pointed at her and placed the briefcase on the floor about a metre from her feet. "Pick it up." He ordered her, and as she stepped towards him he retreated towards the circle.  
  
Nina reached for the case when he stopped her. "Take off the coat first."  
  
Nina nodded and slipped out of her thick woollen coat, and then turned, folding it. There were several rows of chairs a few metres away, and she placed in on the seat cushion and then turned back to him, trying not to shiver. She collected the briefcase, and Davison led her back to the circle. He kept his eyes on her, every so often glancing back at the circle of people.  
  
"Stand in the middle." He ordered her as she reached the outskirts of his group, and she took two strides to make it between the rows of people, and then she moved to stand in the centre of the circle.  
  
Davison softened as he began to feel more comfortable with his new hostage, he gave her a misleading smile. "It's nice to finally meet you." He told her, as he began walking round the outside of the circle. He came to rest after he'd walked a third of the circle and took the safety off the gun and pulled the slide back. "Guess we don't need these anymore." He said happily, he turned and aimed his gun at a camera on the pillar above his head, shooting the glass lens and the wires, and then aimed at the one across on the other side of the circle. The glass smashed and clattered to the floor, and Nina cringed, the SWAT team would have no idea what was going on.  
  
Davison blew the top of his gun, and wiped the gunpowder off his hand. "Always wanted to do that," he confessed, "All that time in the military, and I never fired my gun, believe that?" He resumed walking around the circle.  
  
Nina wondered where the remote she'd seen in the video footage was, he was walking clockwise around the circle, so his left side was turned to her, but even so she should have been able to see the detonator in his hand, he must have pocketed it. "Why didn't we get any warning about this one?" She asked him. He walked past her until she could only see his movement in black and white in her peripheral vision, and then she tilted her head to look at him the other way. "You've given us tonic signals for the other two, why not this one?"  
  
Davison didn't answer. "How's your head?" he asked instead, pausing for a moment in front of her to ask the question before he began to walk around her again.  
  
Nina had to think about the answer, the pain in her head wasn't there at the moment. "It's okay." She told him cautiously, trying to gauge for herself if it was actually hurting anymore.  
  
"It looked like it was bleeding pretty badly." He commented, "Did they give you anything for it?" Nina could almost detect a note of concern in his voice, and so she called him on it. "Just answer the question." He told her gruffly, and continued walking around the circle.  
  
A child in the second row burst into tears, and a businessman ended up comforting him, hugging the little child to his leg as the boy ruined his expensive suit. Nina watched the exchange before she answered him. "They gave me a painkiller and some Dramamine. It's fine now."  
  
He paused behind her. "And making you sea sick? Right, I mean Dramamine's the stuff you take for motion sickness?"  
  
Nina turned as she answered. "Yeah, I guess it was making me dizzy, but not as badly as watching you walk around me."  
  
Davison smiled and nodded. He ran a hand through the short hair on his head, and decided to stay put. "What about your stomach?" He asked.  
  
"They wanted to open me up and see if you permanently damaged any of my organs. Bruised pancreas and liver, I should be in hospital right now."  
  
"I'm sorry." Apologised Davison, "I shouldn't have thrown it so hard, but it was heavy and I wasn't sure how far it would go, I couldn't risk that you'd see me."  
  
She was alarmed, "You threw that chunk of concrete at me?"  
  
"Well not threw." He said and used his right hand to illustrate something dropping, complete with sound effects.  
  
"You dropped it on me?" she clarified.  
  
He nodded, "Had to." Nina tried to suppress the nausea she felt at that. Davison continued on without preamble. "I did think about giving you guys warning about this one, but I figured, seeing as you nearly stopped the last one, perhaps it would be better if I placed it before I told you." He muttered.  
  
The nausea didn't go when Davison changed topics. It became the urge to wretch, and she doubled over, unable to stop herself. The rapid contraction of her stomach muscles only served to trigger terrible pain in her abdomen and for a second it was as though her it was being ripped out. Her face broke out in a sweat and she gave herself lots of time to stand upright again.  
  
"You okay?" Davison asked her just as Jack's voice came crackling over the earpiece: "Nina what happened?"  
  
"I'm fine." She said aloud, hoping Davison and Jack could hear her. The microphone was clearly sensitive enough for it to pick up the wretching sound. She wanted to move swiftly on, suppressing the urge by talking. "How about this for a reason? How about you didn't intend to give us any warning for this last one?"  
  
Davison laughed and took a few steps around the circle before he realised he'd promised to stop. "What makes you think that?"  
  
"The remote in your pocket." Davison gave the impression that he was caught off guard.  
  
He was misleading her, she was sure, on the camera footage the remote hadn't been obviously displayed, but he been hoping she'd search for it. "You weren't planning on telling us about this bomb, you were just going to detonate it. Was there a reason? Were you getting bored of my conversation? We could have called an FBI negotiator in for you?" she swung the briefcase in her hand, confident that C4 was stable enough to not explode from some gentle knocking. "What's the blast radius on your latest work, Dave?" she was baiting him.  
  
"Enough." He growled at her, fuming for a minute. "It's wide enough."  
  
"C4?" she questioned.  
  
Davison nodded, sliding out the bullet clip, and checking it, poking at the bullets before he slotted it back in. "So, where did you learn to make bombs?" She asked, "We both know you didn't learn the intricacies of mass destruction from the army. I've read your file."  
  
"Well they taught me the basics of the basics." He was boasting. "But most of it I had to learn for myself."  
  
"And where did you get the C4 from?"  
  
"Stole a little here, a little there." He noticed Nina's raised eyebrow and explained, "Maybe half a kilogram here, there. You see the weight of the explosive varies according to the conditions it's kept in. So if it's wet, the weight can be twenty to thirty percent on top of the weight of C4."  
  
"So you take a pound of C4 from a twenty pound bag and claim that the extra weight was water, or add some to keep the weight up."  
  
"It's amazing how stupid some officers are." He chuckled, and took a few steps to the right before turning and taking a few in the opposite direction, oscillating around his original position.  
  
"Is that how you got that entire drum you had in your apartment?" she asked, imagining the size that Jack had told her it was, but having no idea of the density of C4 she wasn't sure how much he had to steal to fill it. The suitcase was quite heavy, although she had no numerical concept of the weight, she could imagine the drum weighing slightly more than her.  
  
"Is there anything in particular about this one that makes it special? Why weren't you going to warn us? You getting bored of playing with us? Of making us run around LA?" Nina baited him.  
  
In the stress she felt the pain in her head return too, like a vein in he forehead burst, tearing the skin in thousands of places. The millions of little nerves in the skin on her forehead were screaming, and her eyes began to water. "Were you just hoping to kill as many people as possible, and maybe call afterwards to gloat?"  
  
Davison didn't say anything, merely walking back and forth, oscillating. Nina continued trying to spur him on, get him to talk. "You obviously weren't planning on telling us. No timers, just a remote, right?" Nina walked over to his side of the circle. "Did you want to watch?"  
  
Davison snapped to look at her. "Get back in the middle!" He ordered, and Nina raised an eyebrow at him, and then calmly walked back to the centre of the circle.  
  
"Easy, Nina." Jack cooed over the earpiece, "The last thing we need is to have him get angry and trigger happy."  
  
"Don't you think I know that?" She whispered into the microphone whilst her back was turned.  
  
It was a while before Davison's breathing slowed and became deep enough so Nina could presume he was calm. "You know at the metro station, we found a little girl in the wreckage, her mother was dead and she was in pretty bad state. We took her to the hospital and she stabilised." She began to weave a story, inserting elements of truth to make it realistic, but not quite convincing enough for a polygraph. "We got a hold of her father, who came in to the hospital, and grieved over her mother, then he told her off for not getting out of bed early enough to take the bus. And then a blood clot from one of her many, many cuts made its way towards her heart, and she died."  
  
"Shut up!" exclaimed Davison, turning his side to her and increasing the distance he walked with each swing past her.  
  
"How many people do you suppose are in this room?" she continued. She was finally sensing remorse in him, and she was going to play on it. "One hundred? Two hundred? I feel like I'm giving a lecture, how about two hundred and nineteen? That's how many people were either killed or taken in to hospital yesterday morning after your bomb on the metro system. Did you know that?"  
  
"Shut up!" He yelled again. A few hostages in their assembled audience began to cry, they could feel the tension rising, and were all afraid for their lives.  
  
"Why?" asked Nina, spinning round to look at him, "I'm in the middle."  
  
She let him cool down again a little before she spoke again, she wanted him to get upset and then calm him down enough to do some rational thinking before she bombarded his mind with the unpleasantness of what he'd chosen to do with his life again. In the long run it would help make his final decision more formed, so hopefully it wouldn't be a suicidal choice.  
  
"The bomb was placed quite high up in the train." She told him, "Did you do that intentionally, to maximise the blast? It was the beginning of rush hour, and that train was seven carriages long. The bomb was in the third carriage in, but the explosion blew out the back of the train. Two carriages behind, and two carriages in front. The little girl was in the third carriage in front of the bomb, but she still died. Each carriage has about thirty seats in it, and we both know commuters cram themselves into any space they can find."  
  
She gripped a hand to her side, pressing it onto her stomach, just above the bandage, hoping to stop the blood flow to the whole painful area. "Did you pick that building yesterday because of the September eleventh visual, or because it was convenient? You had access. Tell me, did you know the people at JayKay's marketing? Had you met Mr Kaiman, the 'Kay' of JayKay's? Did you know his fifteen year old daughter who was interning with him for the week?" She paused, hoping to once again gauge his reaction. "Mr Kaiman sent her out of the building with his secretary, but he'd chosen to stay inside and telephone Mr Janison in London, the 'Jay' by the way. When Mr Janison's connection went dead he presumed it was a fault with the new phone system."  
  
Davison was getting even more strung out, but Nina kept ranting. It was more because she was angry than any tactic. "Do you know how many fringe groups tried to take advantage of the asset movement in October? When all the military reserves were called up? Do you embrace pluralism? All these groups all trying to take advantage of a country in mourning and how many succeeded? None. Zero. I guess you should feel a little proud of yourself for succeeding where oh so many failed."  
  
She took a few steps towards him, moving from side to side with him as he oscillated back and forth. "Except," she phrased it like a revelation, it was a question they had yet to answer. "We know why each of those groups did what they did. What about you?"  
  
Davison's pacing got faster. "What's your motivation?" Davison stopped abruptly and levelled the gun at her chest.  
  
"Get back in the middle!" He screamed at her.  
  
Nina calmly raised an eyebrow at him, and then retreated slowly back to the centre. When she turned back to Davison he was still watching her, but had taken a few steps backwards. After a few moments of mutual observation he smiled, when he spoke there was a cheerful note in his voice. "I'm just going to nip off, I need to take care of something."  
  
Davison turned and began to walk away. "Don't be calling the SWAT team in, remember, I've still got the remote."  
  
Nina was confused and for a second she thought about her conversation with Jack earlier. What if he was retreating to a safe distance to detonate the bomb. She took a quick glance down at the briefcase. It was too heavy to throw, it would never make it far enough away from the group. She chased after him, if he was close to the bomb he wouldn't blow it. He was rapidly getting away, nearly half the way across the room, and so she stumbled over the last row of the circle and ran towards him, she had to reach him before he made it to the metro entrance, he could use the pillars to shield him from the blast.  
  
-24-  
  
"What the hell was that?" Jack asked the team in the van. He didn't even wait for a response before he pressed the send button, to talk to Nina. "Nina, what's going on?" he asked her, pressing the microphone of his headset closer to his mouth. "Nina?"  
  
"It's no use," Jerry explained. "We've lost the signal."  
  
Jack pulled off his headset and chucked it on the counter. Grabbing huge handfuls of his hair, he rested himself against the far wall. The explosion had sounded through the wire and been heard loud and clear in the van before dissolving into static, now there was no response from Nina, and the wire had been destroyed, probably melted into a little pool of charred plastic inside it's wearer's ears. 


	14. Hidden under your clothes

Jack paced the van; around him the other agents were in uproar. Copell was ordering Jerry to get the signal back, and Jerry was yelling that they'd lost it, that he couldn't get it back. The SWAT team were asking permission to go in, and Jack wasn't sure what to answer. He wasn't sure whether to go in, afraid of what he'd see, and then also needing to help Nina.  
  
Copell stood, "Shall we go in and have a look?" he said, having already made up his mind. He zipped up his flack jacket and pulled his gun out of his holster. He took the safety off, as he waited for an answer.  
  
Jack nodded, undoing the back door to the van and jumping onto the ground. He landed with a splash in a puddle that had collected in the road from the recent rain, now stopped, and shivered against the cold. He left his jacket in the van and didn't even consider going in to get it. In the back of his mind he heard Copell calling the SWAT team, and then they ran in front of him to the station, leading the way in.  
  
They rushed through the first row of doors and checked all the shop fronts, two agents running into each and checking around before telling the others it was clear to advance. The glass doors at the other end of the corridor were shattered on the floor, but the opening mechanism still triggered when they climbed over the turnstile. The door opened halfway and shut on it's own safety mechanism when it bashed into a large chunk of glass.  
  
The agents stepped through the frames and made their way into the central area of the station. Jack hung back, until one of the SWAT team members brushed past him, then he slid his hand into his pocket and pulled out his gun, cocking it ready to fire, in case Davison had survived the explosion.  
  
The circle of people were still there. Sitting on the floor, some hugging each other, several crying. There were pillars just past the circle, several intact, a few in the distance blown into. Nina was standing in between two. Jack ran towards her, ignoring the agents, ignoring the hostages.  
  
Nina looked confused, she turned around. She looked at the entrance, looked at the hostages, looked at Jack, but didn't absorb that he was there. She turned back to look in the opposite direction, and put the briefcase down on the floor. She squatted over it and opened it. It was filled with sand, and she pulled the bags out, Jack approached, "Nina." He whispered her name as he knelt down behind her. She put the sandbag down on the floor and placed her hand on top of it, resting on it for support as once again the pain amplified.  
  
He quickly flicked the safety back on his gun and pocketed it, and then placed a hand either side of her waist and tried to lift her up. For a moment she didn't want to budge, groaning as his hand pressed against her wound, and then he looped his hands under her arms, and pulled. "Come on." He whispered encouragingly.  
  
Once stood up she leant into his support, using her hands to paw at her forehead. She shut her eyes as she massaged the bridge of her nose and Jack watched with concern.  
  
Copell approached from behind. "Jack?" He ventured as a few members of the SWAT team came up behind him.  
  
"Yeah," Jack turned his head towards him, he couldn't turn completely without letting Nina drop a little, and he couldn't do that. Jack slid his hand down her side and pulled her towards him, letting her rest on his shoulder. He looked past Copell for a moment, and saw the blast, and a body lying in the centre, close to the subway entrance. "I think that's Davison." Jack said, and Copell ran past leading the SWAT team further on. Few paused for a moment as they passed Jack and Nina, who was holding onto Jack lest she collapse to the floor.  
  
"I have to take you to the hospital." He whispered into her ear, as her hands clawed at his shirt, slipping as she tried to hold herself up.  
  
"No, not yet." She pleaded, and lifted her face to look at him. The pain was like liquid now, pumping through her veins in place of blood, but she couldn't stop. Jack cupped her chin, kissing her eyebrow, her cheeks were scuffed with soot, and she was shaking. "Not yet." She said again, pushing forcefully at his chest. She took a moment to regain her footing and then she walked back across the station to the broken glass entrance.  
  
Copell caught Jack glancing back and forth from Nina's retreating form to the blast site, and he called him over. "Looks like we're going to have to get your explosives guy in here." He commented, stepping outside the tarnished stone. Jack nodded disjointedly.  
  
Copell saw Nina disappear into the entrance hall. "Take her to the hospital." He told Jack.  
  
"What?" Jack honestly seemed surprised.  
  
"I've got one of Carrey's cards, I can call him. Davison's dead, so there's no rush on her statement." Copell looked over at his body as he spoke. "I doubt your wife would object to you taking her to the hospital."  
  
Jack froze for a moment, and then looked Copell in the eyes. He seemed to be measuring something as he squinted at him. "Thanks." He said eventually, and took two steps backwards, Copell watched him retreat, and then turned back to Davison as Jack called his name. "John!" He attracted his attention. "We split up." He told him, and then sprinted across the room, weaving between the hostages as they were escorted out of the building. He noticed Nina's coat, folded, on a chair in the waiting room and grabbed it, heading out.  
  
-24-  
  
The officers manning the rope line had their work cut out for them. Reporters were bombarding them with questions, using the zoom on their cameras to get as much information about the train station as possible. Jack looked up and down the road as he searched for Nina, finally spotting her weaving in and out of the cars on her way to his SUV. He called out her name and didn't earn a response, and then ran in between the cars to catch up with her. She braced herself on the door before she pulled the handle when Jack caught up with her. "Nina." He called, sliding in the gap between someone's fender and someone's rear spoiler to catch her.  
  
She rolled over, leaning against the back door. "Open the car, Jack." She requested, leaning forward as though she was going to be sick and then straightening again.  
  
"You need to go to the hospital." He told her, walking slower now he had her attention.  
  
"I need sleep, food, my apartment..." She contradicted, her head swaying. Her face was block white, more than usual, and fine beads of sweat hung to her forehead and eyebrows.  
  
Jack moved his head with hers to keep her attention focused on him. "...A morphine drip, a laparoscopy." He finished for her.  
  
She shook her head, supporting one side with her hand as though she was afraid it would fall. Jack placed a hand either side of her body, ready to hold her up if necessary. "No, what I need is..."  
  
Nina leant forward as another wave of nausea came over her. The bulletproof vest was too tight, there wasn't enough space for her to breath, the wire pack was itching her skin, and she had to get them off. "...This vest, I need." Nina didn't bother telling him, just pulling the buttons open, letting them pop or break, and she wasn't really interested which.  
  
"Nina, what are you doing?" Jack grabbed her hands and stopped her, just as she managed to get at the buttons undone to her belly button, exposing most of the Kevlar vest. Her coat threatened to slip from his arm, and he freed her hands to gather it up, and then moved her just enough to open the back door, pushing her inside.  
  
Nina was relieved to have the seat underneath her; it meant she didn't have to do all the work. She slid backwards along the seat to give Jack room to get in and he shut the car door. When she was settled against the seat, she finished undoing the buttons on her shirt. "What are you doing?" he questioned again, reaching out a hand to stop her, which she easily avoided.  
  
"I have to get this off." She muttered, "I can't breath in it." She unhooked the last button and shrugged the sleeves off. Next she reached for the Velcro strips. Jack helped her, raising the material over her head when she found it too painful. With her back turned slightly to him, he was able to unplug the microphone, and he peeled the black pack off as slowly as he could. Nina didn't complain. She pulled the mike and it's cord out of her bra and passed it to him, focused on smoothing the edges of the bandage flat against her skin. "Check the vest, did I bleed on it?" she asked.  
  
"What?" Jack said, not really wanting an answer. He unfolded the vest and looked, it was clean white. "No." Nina turned back to him and reached out of her shirt. He gripped her hand and moved it so he could see the centre of the bandage, it was red and a little yellow where her wound had broken, he scowled at her. "I'm taking you to the hospital." He placed her shirt on her lap and reached for the door handle.  
  
"Wait..." Nina called, slid her finger inside her ear. She retrieved the transmitter and placed it on top of the vest with the resting of the listening device. "Give those back." She said, and began to find the arm holes in her shirt.  
  
"And then we're going to the hospital...." He prompted, hoping she'd agree this time. She concentrated on putting her shirt sleeves the right way round. "Nina?"  
  
"Give those back and then we can go to the hospital." She agreed, sliding the shirt around her back, and pushing her hands through the armholes.  
  
Jack let go of the handle, reaching for her. He rubbed some of the dirt off of her cheek, and brushed some of the disturbed hair back behind her ear. "I really don't want to see you at work tomorrow." He told her smiling before he kissed her. He tried not to lean on the equipment as he leant into the kiss, sliding his hands down her back to pull the shirt up and over her shoulders. Jack kissed her neck and her collarbone, licking the little hollow just above it before he pulled her shirt closed. Nina kissed his forehead as he rose to look at her. "I wish we could continue this, but you need medical attention." He mumbled to her, pulling away to collect together the equipment, and reaching for the car door handle.  
  
-24-  
  
Nina pulled back the bolt and opened the door. Jack was standing, looking a little awkward in the corridor outside her apartment. He was brandishing a carton on tomato juice and nodding slowly with a gentle smile on his face. "You know you could have called me for a lift home from the hospital?"  
  
Nina moved aside to let him pass, and then shut the door behind him. "You were busy." She said.  
  
"Yeah, I was at CTU. But I don't recall changing my cell phone number." He handed her the tomato juice and gave her a once over. Her forehead was a blotchy red colour but only two or three of the hundreds of tiny stitches she'd had on her forehead remained.  
  
"What's this for?" She asked referring to the carton. He took a moment to survey her other wound. The bandage around her waist was partially covered by her pyjamas, which wasn't a surprising choice of attire considering it was nearly midnight. Her pyjamas consisted of a pair of loose green trousers and a white vest top that barely covered most of her midrift, although, at this point only revealed the bandage. She was keeping herself warm in a short flannel bathrobe, which slipped down her shoulder as she spoke.  
  
"Not wine, incase you were on medication." He explained as she read the label on the carton and hoisted the sleeve of her robe back up. She nodded and scampered off into what appeared to be the kitchen. "Do you want a glass?" she called back.  
  
"Yeah." Jack called back to her. Glancing into her kitchen briefly before he looked at the other room that was off from the entrance area. It was a living area, quite a decent space. There were two doors leading off of it in the far corner, but right near the door she had a little corner cabinet of drink and glasses, a decanter of whisky sat on top, along with two upturned glasses. On the same wall was a decent stereo system, resting on a huge chrome support system, it was playing a cd at the moment, classical music, strings at this instant, and he moved on round the room. The next wall he came to was painted a different colour. The first had been green, the second was burgundy, the next blue and the fourth purple, all of them strong colours, all of them warm. This wall had a few photos on it, black and white, and closer to the doors at the end, was a short counter top with a television and all related appliances on it. The remotes were placed on top of the vcr or dvd player, a sign of order that led him to presume she rarely watched it; they were all off at the moment, flashing the time up, all three of them reading exactly the same. The vcr was flashing up the symbol that a tape was inserted, and he pressed the eject button, reading the label before pushing it back into the vcr. 'Auntie Nina's visit, July 2001, Jacob's second birthday' Behind him, her laptop sprung to life, and he lowered himself to the sofa to look at the file on the computer. The screen saver had activated and he placed a finger on the mouse pad to wake the computer. A word document flashed up, and he grabbed a handful of papers from the side to try and work out what she was working on.  
  
"Hey?" Nina objected, as she walked into the room and placed two glasses of tomato juice on the coffee table. She sat down next to him on the couch and put a bottle of Worcestershire sauce next to her laptop as she reached over to close down the file she had open.  
  
"What were you working on?" Jack asked, collecting the sauce and opening the lid to give it a sniff, he'd never seen it before.  
  
Nina began to compile her papers together, and answered as she checked their order. "Satellite photos of that cult outside San Diego, compiling the records we've got on weapons movement. You asked for me to give it to you by Tuesday."  
  
Jack laughed, putting the bottle of sauce back on the table. "You mean this week Tuesday, when you were in two explosions, admitted to hospital twice..."  
  
"Yes, that Tuesday." She replied, upturning the bottle over her tomato juice and emptying a good portion of the bottle into her glass. She put the lid back on and licked some sauce off her finger, then leant back over to turn off her computer, pushing it to the back of the table and putting the files on top of it. She settled herself into the back of the couch and cradled her drink. Jack twisted himself towards her and used a finger to stroke hers around the glass.  
  
"I think that can wait until you get back to work." He told her, letting his baritone voice drop another octave. Nina smiled at him, and he kissed her neck and then her ear lobe on his way to kiss her lips. He hadn't seen her whilst she was in hospital, as she was always asleep by the time he got off work, and although they'd only kept her in for two days, he had been concerned that she had changed her mind about the changes in their relationship, but when he kissed her, she happily kissed him back.  
  
Some how he managed to pull her on top of him, spread diagonally across the better part of the sofa during their kiss, and when she broke it, she turned and settled herself on his lap, leaning back against him. Jack slid a hand over her stomach, lightly rubbing her bandage. "Why didn't they do a laparoscopy in the end?" he asked.  
  
"Too well healed already, there was no infection. They didn't want to open me up again unless they absolutely had to." She replied, sighing contentedly. Her head was rested over his shoulder, placing her neck close to his chin, and he kissed her neck, giving her time to ask her question. "What about the case?" she asked him. "I gave my statement to the police at the hospital, but the officer had no idea what was going on with Davison."  
  
Jack nodded into her shoulder, breathing in the smell of her soap and shampoo, her hair was slightly damp, even though her skin was dry, she'd probably just taken a shower. She'd been pretty lucid when he'd taken her out of the station, and that had been the last time she'd had contact with the case. "Davison was wearing all the C4 he'd taken out of his stock under his coat. The remote was connected to the bomb on his chest, and he detonated it in the subway entrance. The briefcase was a diversion, filled with sand. Nobody got hurt, well, except him."  
  
Nina groaned as his fingers made contact with her skin a little higher. "What else?" she asked.  
  
"Carrey reconstructed the device about ninety-five percent, he's filing a report on all the cases for us. CTU have a new stock of C4, and JayKay's marketing are trying to rebuild their offices with a memorial to the workers who died." Jack kissed her neck again and raised his hands to push her robe off of her shoulders. "And forty nine more people from the metro station were released from hospital." Nina turned in his arms and leant into his body again, kissing his neck, he pulled her back to look at her. "I think he wanted to spare you."  
  
"Spare me?" she sat up on her own as Jack shifted on the sofa.  
  
"When you railed him about all the people he'd hurt, I think he decided he didn't want to hurt anyone else." Jack reached for her again, "especially not you." He kissed her and, having finally succeeded in removing her robe, he tossed it across the room. "Are we okay?"  
  
"We're fine, I wish you'd stop asking that." She growled as she started undoing the buttons on his black suit shirt.  
  
Nina kissed the skin under Jack's ear as he apologised, and his voice went up a half an octave, which still rendered it pretty low. "I just want to make sure that this is..."  
  
Nina pulled back and rested herself on her elbows. "It is what I want Jack, and we're both professional, private people, we shouldn't have any problems at work." Jack regarded her warily for a moment and then smiled at her, pulling her down for a kiss.  
  
"So we're okay?" He said, once more as he began to help her with his buttons, it was more of a statement than a question, but she answered anyway, most of the sound muffled by Jack's tongue.  
  
"We're fine."  
  
  
  
THE END  
  
There will be no sequels (before anyone asks) I will however probably end up writing a few alternate ways in which they could have hooked up. I realise the last scene was a little cutsie, but...well I'm the author and I wanted to! I would have written it a little more in line with the characters, but I made this a PG-13 fic, so I couldn't. I'll try and do a fic where Jack gets whumped, as requested, poor Nina took a few blows in this one. She's kind of my favourite character in 24, although I think in this one, towards the end, I deviated from her and made her a little more like me. It's getting harder to write Jack/Nina fics as they don't get any screen time at the moment, and Tony's stopped being a wanker, but I'm sure I'll find my niche again.  
  
As always, feedback encourages me to write, and anything you'd like to see, write it up there! I've got a couple of plots (not all of them this long) on the boiler at the moment, and I'm not sure which to pursue next, so any suggestions would really be helpful.  
  
Teryl Rothery rocks (even if this is the wrong show) Love Aria! 


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